A woman has given birth to a 12 pound 9 ounce baby, who was so large it took two people to lift him out of her.
Amy Smit, 27, from the U.K. county of Buckinghamshire, told The Bucks Herald her baby Zeik was 24 inches tall when he was born on March 25.
On average, newborn babies are 20 inches in length, ranging from 18 to 22 inches, and weigh around 7.5 pounds, ranging between 5.5 to 10 pounds.
As a point of comparison, baby Zeik was about the size of an average two-month-old baby, or bigger than a common 10 pound household cat, when he was born.
Smit told The Bucks Herald Zeik was delivered by c-section, “luckily.”
She said: “He was so big that it took two people to lift him out… All I could hear were the doctors and midwives saying ‘he’s humongous, he’s so big’. When they lifted him over the screen to show me I could hardly believe it.”
Smit told the SWNS news agency, “There were all these really small ladies around me, and I heard one of them saying, ‘I need some help, he’s enormous.’
“When they lifted him above the screen for me and Zac to see, my first words were ‘bloody hell.'”
She and her husband had to abandon the newborn clothes they had bought for Zeik. At two-months-old, he’s wearing clothes for six to nine-month-old babies.
“We wouldn’t change him—even if he’s nothing like a newborn,” she said.
Smit told SWNS: “We knew he was going to be a tall baby, because all the scans showed he was quite long, and both Zac and I are around the six-foot mark. But we had no idea he would be that big.”
There are a variety of reasons why some babies are particularly large when they are born, including genetics, how much weight a mother gains when she is pregnant, as well as the mother having diabetes.
Appetite does not appear to explain Zeik’s size, as Smit said she lost her appetite she was pregnant.
“I just went off food. I never fancied any meals, I couldn’t eat meat or anything,” she told SWNS.
While Zeik is a big baby, he doesn’t quite match up to the heaviest baby ever born on record. A woman named Anna Bates, who herself was 7 feet 11 inches tall, gave birth to a boy weighing 22 pounds in Ohio in 1879. The baby, who was 28 inches in length, died 11 hours after its birth. Bates is thought to have lost approximately six gallons of fluid when her waters broke.
The boy’s father, Martin van Buren Bates, wrote at the time that his son was “was perfect in every respect. He looked at birth like an ordinary child of six months.”
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