Jade Packer and Ryan King are the proud parents of one big baby boy. Baby George King was born on February 11, reports the BBC, weighing a whopping 15 lbs and 7 ounces. He’s more than twice the size of an average baby, and wears clothes made for 3 to 6-month-olds as a newborn. Doctors and her new parents weren’t expecting their new son to be quite that size. Big babies did not run in either Packer or King’s families. “When his head was out that’s when they realized he was so big,” Packer explained to the BBC. Large babies are known as macrosomia in the medical community. In order to be classified as a oversized infant, babies need to be in the top 10th percentile in weight when they were born, normally meaning between 9 to 10 pounds. It might be hard to believe that doctors weren’t able to tell that George was going to be larger than average while in utero, but Dr. Jennifer Wu, OBGYN at Lenox Hill Hospital in NY, explained to CBSNews.com that it is often hard to predict the size of a baby.
“Ultrasound is not 100 percent,” she said. “It’s about 10 percent off, and it actually is more off if the baby is extremely small or extremely large.”
Wu, who has no involvement in this case, said that doctors estimate the size of a child by taking measurements of the head, belly and femur bone in their leg. Sometimes measurements can be hard to get if you do a sonogram later in the pregnancy, because the head is low in the pelvis or birth canal. Other times, babies might be might not be proportional in size, changing the estimate. Other issues with large baby births include difficult vaginal delivery, more soft tissue trauma and larger tears during pregnancy, Wu explained. The mother and child are also at an increased risk of shoulder dysplasia, something that Packer reportedly experienced with George’s birth.
