Observation or daily log — which is this?
The log screen gives you eight tiles — Bottle, Meal, Nap, Diaper, Mood, Activity, Observation, Note — and two of them look like they overlap. You will hit this on your first morning.
The question
Who is the subject of the sentence?
If the sentence is about something you did for the child, it is a daily-log entry: Bottle, Meal, Nap, Diaper, Activity. If it is about something the child did, it is an Observation.
That is not a style preference. A nappy change is a record of a service performed. An observation is a record about the child. They are different kinds of fact and that is why they are different tiles.
Worked through
| What you have | Tile |
|---|---|
| "4oz formula, 10:15" | Bottle |
| "Ate all of lunch" | Meal |
| "Slept 12:30 to 2:10" | Nap |
| "Wet, 10:40" | Diaper |
| "Painting, twenty minutes outside" | Activity |
| "Cheerful all morning" | Mood |
| "Worked out that the big jug fills the small one twice" | Observation |
| "Please send more spare socks" | Note |
The last two are the pair worth looking at. Both are free text. Both are typed into a box. They go to different places in a guardian's head and in ours.
Where Note fits
Note is a message to the family. Spare socks, the shoes that keep coming off, a reminder about Friday. Operational, useful, and done with once it has been read.
Observation is a record about the child. It is the one entry type meant to be worth re-reading later rather than acted on today.
If you file "she counted to seven twice" as a Note, it lands in the family's updates and it is gone. If you file "please send socks" as an Observation, it sits in the child's record as though it were something she did. Neither one breaks anything. Both make the record slightly less useful than it could have been, and the difference compounds over a year.
Mood is not a short observation
Mood is a quick tap with an optional note — the cheapest way to say how the day is going. It takes a second and that is the point.
If you find yourself typing a paragraph into the Mood note, what you actually have is an observation, and the Observation tile is right there. The reverse is also true: if your observation says only "cheerful", that was a Mood.
Can it be both?
Yes, and that is normal. A child who eats nothing at lunch and then spends ten minutes carefully feeding the toy rabbit has given you a Meal entry and an Observation. Log both. They are quick, and the two facts are not substitutes for each other — one is what happened at the table, the other is what she was working on.
If you are unsure, pick Observation
The cost of getting this wrong is not symmetrical. A daily-log fact filed as an observation is a slightly odd-looking record. An observation filed as a Note or a Mood is a record that is simply gone.
Next
What to write when you write an observation — six pairs, each the same moment written vaguely and then specifically.
Did this solve it?