You or somebody you know may have weighed around 7 pounds, 1 ounce (3.2 kg) at birth. So say the medical books. But this comes to contradict them: in a small Siberia city, a 17-pound, 1 ounce (7.7 kg) baby girl has just been delivered by Tatiana Khalina, 42, the mother of other 11 children.
The
girl was born on September 17, 2007, through Cesarean section at a maternity clinic in Aleisk, a city of 30,000 people in the Altai region (south central Siberia, near the border with Kazakhstan and Mongolia).
The birth went smoothly, both mother and child being fine and the baby, Nadia, was transferred from the small clinic to a maternity hospital in Barnaul, a larger city. "We were all simply in shock. What did the father say? He couldn't say a thing he just stood there blinking. I ate everything, we don't have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes", said the mother.
All her children weighed over 5 kg (11 pounds) at birth. "The girl is feeling well and developing normally," said Irina Kurdeka, a doctor at the Barnaul hospital. "The family has modest means. Khalina's husband was on contract with a local military unit. We have presented them with a good washing machine, a food package and a card. We will keep supporting them in the future.", the local social services chief, Marina Alistratova, said to the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets.
An average weight for newborn babies is around 7 pounds, 1 ounce, according to international statistics. The Guinness Book of World Records registered the heaviest baby ever, born in the US in 1879: it weighed 23 pounds, 12 ounces (10.7 kg) (but it died 11 hours after birth. The heaviest surviving baby was born in 1955 in Italy, weighing 22 pounds, 8 ounces (10.15 kg) at birth.
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