There has been somewhat of a baby boom in my life. I started noticing last fall when I was beginning the journey of my 3rd pregnancy that I had knew a lot of other people that were also pregnant. I started keeping track of who was due when and since my tracking started last November, 22 new little lives have begun. The baby boom seems to be over now, no more babies (hopefully) until December when I have 4 friends due around Christmas time and then no more that I’m aware of.
I’m a numbers person, I make spreadsheets just for fun and like to make comparisons, do averages, analyze, and sort quanties…all that geeky math stuff! I have spreadsheets to keep track of our budget, Honeybun’s school attendance, my hours worked and pay received, and SOOOO much more. So naturally when I needed a way to keep track of who was having babies when, I decided a spreadsheet was the way to go.
As people started having babies, I started noticing some patterns emerging so added birth stats to my spreadsheet, things like gender, weight and mode of delivery (based only on publicly shared information or personal conversations, I never ask for the info). When I started looking at my data, some really interesting patterns started to emerge.
Gender is pretty well spread, leaning slightly towards more boys (12 boys vs 10 girls) but they started largely grouped. I had 3 friends have boys last November and 6 friends had girls between January and May. Doodle was just before the 6th girl and then 6 friends all had boys in June and July! Since August gender has been more mixed: girl, girl, girl, boy, girl, boy.
Of my 4 friends due in December, 2 of them are having girls and the other 2 don’t know (or aren’t telling!). I’m surprised that overall, one third of my friends did not or have not found out the gender. I would have thought this was much lower though prior to this month, only 3 (including myself) out of 16 didn’t know their baby’s gender before birth (about 18%).
Most surprising for me, though, has got to be the baby’s weight. I’ve always heard average birth weight is anything in the 7 pounds but according to my group of peers, that is no longer accurate. Removing 2 preemies (born at 31 and 34 weeks), the average weight of babies I have weights for is a whopping 8 pounds, 11 ounces (I’m partially to blame with my 8 pound, 14 ouncer)! Only three friends have had full-term babies under 8 pounds. Seems we’re building a world of bigger babies…
