To be clear, we’re talking about a 16-pound newborn baby.
And yes, this is a human baby that we’re talking about.
There are some big newborns in this world, but not all of them make doctors wonder if the scale is broken.
This prodigious boy is named Waylon Cole, and he was 16-pounds when he was born.
(We can be kind of judgmental about baby names, but Waylon Cole is a genuinely good name, and with Cole as a middle name, he has a great backup if he doesn’t like being called Waylon)
Waylon’s father, Edmond Hallet, says that people in the delivery room thought that they’d broken the scale when trying to weigh the 16-pound baby.
“The doctors and nurses were like, ‘Oh my god!’”
Well, that’s pretty understandable in terms of reactions.
Waylon was, of course, delivered via cesarean section, which is why he and his mother are still alive.
But while the family expected that he would be a big baby, they honestly didn’t realize how large he’d become.
“We ended up weighing him three times because no one could believe he actually weighed 16 pounds. At first I thought maybe the scale was broken.”
The average newborn human weighs 7.5 pounds.
The scales were telling them that Waylon weighed more than two average newborns.
About 95% of babies weigh anywhere from about 5.5 pounds to 10 pounds.
Some babies weigh slightly less when they’re placed on the scale.
It’s not uncommon for a newborn to expel their meconium before even getting weighed.
(Meconium is a bit of excrement, comprised of things that the baby ingested in utero — we’re talking cells, bile, and water)
That can tip the scales and make a baby’s weight seem slightly less dramatic.
But nothing, one way or the other, was going to make Waylon Cole seem like anything else than a giant.
Waylon is 28-year-old Whitney Hallett’s fourth child, by the way.
The other babies were within the range that’s usually considered to be big.
The smallest was 8 pounds, 8 ounces.
The second-smallest was 9 pounds, 14 ounces.
The previous heavyweight champion of the Hallett family was born at 11 pounds, 1 ounce.
Obviously, Waylon Cole has knocked those records out of the park.
He’s kind of knocked every other baby’s weight out of the park.
Whitney had gestational diabetes, which can impact people who are pregnant.
One potential effect of gestational diabetes is that the babies can grow especially large.
But obviously Waylon Cole is a significant outlier.
Waylon has now grown to 17 pounds and 7 ounces, and though he apparently sleeps more than the Hallett family’s other children did as babies, he’s totally healthy.
A lot of babies set records at their respective hospitals, but we’ve never seen any newborn whose weight measured up to Waylon.
