I’d love to know the world record and the American record if possible.
The reason: my son was born today and was measured at 24.5 inches. The nurse acted shocked and re-measured him, showing the pediatrician to back her up that she was doing it right. I didn’t understand at first why they were making a big deal–he didn’t look exceptionally long to me. But then nurses with decades of experience in the maternity ward said they had never *heard *of a baby over 24 inches long.
I took this for hyperbole until I looked at the CDC growth charts. According to them, a newborn boy 18 inches long would be at the 2nd percentile, while one just three inches longer would be at the 98th percentile. Suddenly it clicked that my son’s length really was extraordinary. So now I’m wondering *how *extraordinary it is.
Thank you! Heh, I was kind of drooling over that possibility (of him becoming some kind of Shawn Bradley orMark Eaton type) earlier today, much to my wife’s chagrin.
One other odd footnote: my current wife is a 5’10" Minnesotan of Scandinavian heritage, and her dad and brother are well over six feet while her grandfather who recently died was 6’6". But my family is of middling height, and my first wife was very short, as are the older kids we had together. My oldest son, now 12, is the shortest in his class, and is predicted to be about 5’2" as an adult–not a “little person”, not with those dwarfism type proportions, but very short for a Caucasian American man. So the two of them as adults are going to cut an interesting profile, I expect!
BTW, two and a half years later he only comes in at around the 90th percentile for length at his doctor visits. So he’ll be tall, but not NBA tall most likely.
When the delivery doctor measured my daughter, he asked my wife and me, “How long do you want her to be?” thus suggesting that there is no standard way. I think she was 18" (she was 4 weeks premature) and he couldn’t have made her 24", but perhaps 20". Forty nine years later, she is about 5’5".
