A woman in Indonesia gave birth to a baby the size of a year-old toddler on Monday. The boy weighed in at 19.2 pounds and two feet long and came into the world safely via C-section, NBC News reported. (Check out the video on the Web site.)
The big boy, who hasn’t been named yet, set a record in Indonesia, but he came short of the world record of 23 pounds set in 1879. Doctors speculate that the boy grew so big because his mother had gestational diabetes. The condition causes babies to receive too much glucose in the womb.
“He’s got a strong appetite, it’s almost nonstop feeding,” his doctor told Agence France-Presse. “This baby boy is extraordinary; the way he’s crying is not like a usual baby. It’s really loud.”
But for his mother, we’re sure, the baby’s size just means there’s more to love.
The baby was ready to be born, but no one else was available to help except for her big sister.
Mom Briana Johnson had to depend on her 6-year-old daughter, Diyana, to fetch towels and other supplies. Johnson, a nurse from the Raleigh, NC, area, had to deliver the infant herself on Wednesday because the baby came faster than the ambulance and relatives.
Diyana saw her mom in pain through the contractions, but managed to be brave and not cry. “I was asleep and my mama woke me up,” Diyana told the Raleigh News & Observer. “She had stomach pains, and then she had the baby. I helped by getting the baby a blanket and opening the door for the rescue squad.”
Madisyn, who weighed 5.5 pounds, was born safe and sound. And her sister, Diyana, knows firsthand where babies come from.
Staffers at Williston’s Mercy Medical Center in North Dakota are scratching their heads trying to figure out how they sent a new mom home with the wrong baby, according to the Associated Press. The mistake happened last weekend, was discovered within an hour, and the mother was quickly reunited with her own child.
The Mercy mix-up is hardly the only recent incident of its kind. In March of this year, Shatiesha Brown, 32, was dismayed to learn that another mother had been given her baby to breast feed at Brookdale Hospital. After the incident, her daughter, Anya, rejected breast milk.
Get ready for your kids to start begging you for the swine flu — the swine flu stuffed animal that is. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gift shop in Atlanta is actually selling the stuffed toy pictured above, according to the Examiner.
The doll is nominally a teaching tool to help educate kids about the swine flu, but how representing the flu with a stuffed toy that’s pink and plush that you can hug does that, you’ve got us.
In other swine flu news, Kesley Young, a 20-year-old mother of a week-old newborn, died of swine flu last Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, according to the Columbus Post Dispatch. Something tells us that no one will want to buy a swine flu doll for that little girl, who has mercifully survived.
The judge wanted Lisa Marie Morris to be a lesson to all other parents — if you forget your child in a hot car, you go to jail.
Morris, 26, was sentenced last week to five years in prison followed by five years on probation for leaving her baby inside her car. Morris and her cousin had returned to her Augusta, Ga., area home after running errands on Aug. 7, 2008, and Morris says she thought the cousin had brought the child inside. Instead, Dalton Morris, who was just six weeks old, died in the car, where temperatures reached up to 126 degrees.
Morris pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and asked the judge not to send her to jail because she needs to take care of her 5-year-old daughter.
But Judge Michael N. Annis showed no mercy, the Augusta Chronicle reported. He said that Dalton’s death was completely preventable.
Pop quiz: When you encounter a crying toddler in Wal-Mart do you: (a) Thank goodness it’s not your own? (b) Move discreetly to another aisle to get away from the squawking? (c) Inform the mom that if she doesn’t shut that baby up, you will, and then proceed to slap the tot four or five times in the face?
Incredibly, Roger Stephens, 61, allegedly chose option number three at a Wal-Mart in Gwinnett County, Georgia on Monday, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Stephens was arrested and charged with felony cruelty to a child. He’s being held without bond. The two-year-old victim sustained “slight redness to the face.”
A teacher’s aide apparently forgot to take her seven-month-old girl to a babysitter and instead left the child in a school parking lot while she worked on Friday. Addeleena Sanchez died after being left in the car for five hours on Friday at Bowie Elementary School near Dallas, the Corsicana Daily Sun reported.
The child’s mother, 23, called her babysitter around 1:20 p.m., and that’s when she realized that she had forgotten the girl in the car. The temperature then in Corsicana, Tex., was 89 degrees. Police are investigating and have not yet decided whether to charge the mother.
So far this year, 29 kids have died after being left in hot cars. See stories about the tragedies here.
A man told police that he mixed crushed aspirin tablets into a jar of baby food at a CVS drug store in San Jose and may have poisoned more baby food at another store.
Cops have recovered a possibly contaminated jar of Gerber apple-flavored oatmeal. They’re asking customers to be careful with any baby food jars that appear to be tampered with, the San Jose Mercury News reported this weekend.
David Conklin, a 29-year-old transient, has been arrested and is being held ona charge of suspicion of felony poisoning. He had called police to tell them that he had done a “bad thing.”
One-year-old Giselle Gomez was so overheated after being left in a car that her face and body became covered with yellow heat blisters. The child died on Wednesday, and now her mother, Jennifer Gomez, has been jailed and charged with felony child endangerment.
Jennifer Gomez, 22, had left Giselle and her two-year-old sister in the car while she visited at relative at an insurance agency in Belleville, Mo. The kids had been sleeping, and the car’s engine was left running, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
The older child might have accidently turned on the heater, but later managed to leave the car and was not injured, detectives told the newspaper. Giselle wasn’t so lucky — she was strapped into a car seat — and was trapped inside the hot vehicle for at least an hour. The outside temperature at the time was 89 degrees.
This fall and winter, when health officials anticipate a surge in swine flu (H1N1) cases, there likely won’t be enough vaccines to go around. Wednesday, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended which Americans should have access to the H1N1 vaccine first, according to the New York Times.
Pregnant women, caregivers for infants under age six months old, children and young adults ages six months up to 24 years old were all among the group of 150 million Americans who should be given top priority, according to the CDC. The federal government expects about 120 million doses of the vaccine available by the end of October.
In the United States, pregnant women have been particularly hard hit by swine flu. Expectant moms make up about six percent of verified swine flu deaths in the country, while pregnant mothers only account for one percent of the U.S. population.
The CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the World Health Organization all recommend that pregnant women get seasonal flu shots, too, in order to protect themselves and their babies-on-the-way.
For more information on flu shots and pregnancy from the CDC, click here.