My name is Anna and I am the mother of a big baby.
The first inkling that our baby might be of extraordinary size came at our twenty-week sonogram. My husband (Brian) and I waited in breathless anticipation as the sonogram tech maneuvered the wand on my belly and searched the terrain of my uterus for its precious little (ha!) occupant. Suddenly he appeared like an apparition out of the mist, looking distinctly human and waving his hands as if greeting his gape-mouthed parents. Could this recognizable being truly be the same as the flickering heartbeat we'd squinted at fourteen weeks before?
While we were enveloped in selfish wonder at the everyday miracle of conception, the tech was matter-of-factly clicking and measuring as though she were a developer plotting out a subdivision. She pattered on about head circumference and kidneys while I tried to grasp that this fuzzy vision was a baby, not a ghost.
"Babies at this stage are usually eight to ten ounces," I remember her telling me. I nodded. I had read this in one of the many baby books I had, at five months, already read and committed to memory. (In another life, I'd be a professor. Of literature. Not the baby kind, though.)
There was a pause, a nanosecond short of being worrisome.
"Your baby is a pound three."
Essentially, twice as big as expected.
Apparently mistaking my look of surprise for one of horror, the tech quickly explained, "Just because the baby is big at this stage doesn't mean he'll end up big."
I nodded dumbly as the tech peered at the screen, no doubt triple-checking this uncommon weight. Despite her reassurances, I knew. I knew we had a giant on our hands.
You can call it a mother's intuition if you like, but I don't take that much credit. I'm no geneticist, but I can use a tape measure and I come from tall people. At 5'10", I'm not a freak, but as a high-schooler in Ohio I could tell grown men if their parts were straight. (I am not a full head above the crowd in Texas, but that is another post for another day.) My husband is only slightly taller than average, but oh the genes we carry.
My father's family is mostly to blame. They come from solid Swedish farm stock, part of the European immigration of the early twentieth century. My father is 6'5" and his father only a few inches shorter before the weight of old age pressed down on him. My father's grandfather--my baby's great-great-grandfather--was also 6'5" in an era when the average man didn't top six feet even. My baby would be big. There was no turning back from this fact.
I did what any expectant mother would do--I went home and updated my baby registry. "If you would like to get clothes for Alexander," I wrote, now that the sonogram confirmed we should not name him Elena, "please pick out anything you think is cute. But please no newborn sizes. He is a big boy."
And then I waited.
At birth, Alexander was ten pounds, to the general astonishment of everyone in the room except my grandmother, who had looked at my belly at five months (many women have been smaller on delivery day) and predicted a scale-buster.
So why a blog about big babies? In the mediocre sea of mommy forums and unsubstantiated advice, why add my voice? Because I have quickly learned in Xander's first two months that no one talks much about big babies. Certainly, relatives marvel at them and strangers ogle them, but where is the advice about how to handle the challenges posed by larger-than-average babies? Where can a mom vent or share ideas about adapting standard baby advice for the decidedly nonstandard baby? And, most egotistically of all, where can a mom who talks exclusively to nonverbal beings (two cats and a baby) all day indulge her nearly-forgotten love of writing?
Here, my friends. Here, on The Big Baby Blog. Oh, I won't only talk about big babies. But I will focus quite a bit on some of the issues I have encountered and will certainly continue to encounter as far as Xander's size is concerned. Am I an expert? Certainly not. However, I think most moms will tell you that it is moms who have the truest, rawest insights about children. I would like to share some of those. And I hope you will enjoy.
