The Small Girl was born Oct 16, making her now 4 months and 1 week old.
She also weighs about 19 and a half pounds, and it’s not like she’s unusually fat for a baby; she’s loooong. Today we decided her sleepers were too tight so we went to the store and bought some 9-to-12 month sleepers, figuring, hey, they’ll be loose but they’ll last. We put one on her and it fits perfectly. In fact, she’s kind of stretching it.
Are baby clothes sizes estimated too small, or do we have a giant baby on our hands here? Just how far up the growth curve is this kid?
First off, that’s my birthday too, so she gets a special hug from me.
And in my expereice buying clothes for a half dozen of my friends’ offspring, they always end up fitting into clothes that are labeled for at least 3 months older than the kids are. I’m not sure why it’s like that, but I was buying “6 months” clothes for the 3-month-olds, and sometimes up to the 12 month outfits for the 6-month-olds.
The pediatrician hasn’t been putting little dots on a growth curve at each visit and weigh-in? That’s normally how you would see if you’ve got a Godzilla-child on your hands.
I show her tracking in the very high 90’s in percentile weight, possible as high as the 99th percentile. The charts get harder to interpret when you get that high.
Growth charts are available on-line. It took me a minute to figure this one out. You have to find the line that best represents her and follow it to the right.
I was an enormous baby - 10lbs, 3oz, 21 inches. I’m now 5"4’ in shoes and buy petite clothes. I know it’s just an anecdote, but you might not want to start planning on the basketball scholarships just yet.
It does seem that for most babies, clothes are sized small by age label. WhyBaby is unusually small (3rd percentile for her age-from-due-date) and she fits into her age-from-due-date on the label. So even though she’s 12 months by the calender, she’s 8 months from her due date, and solidly in 6-9 month clothes, with a few 9-12 months that are a little baggy on her, and most 9-12 months just too darn big. (Sorry, ages are hard to articulate with preemies! I don’t know if that made any sense.)
But since we know she’s tiny for that age (3rd percentile) we can estimate that up to 97% of babies would need larger clothes than their listed age.
My politically incorrect WAG? The clothes are mostly made in China and the Phillipines, where babies are smaller on average than big horkin’ American and European babies.
