KEY POINTS:
Meet "little" Nadia. Tipping the scales at 7.75kg, the Siberian newborn weighs more than two average New Zealand babies.
Her size stunned even her mother, Tatyana Barabanova, whose previous 11 children all weighed more than 5kg.
Nadia was delivered by caesarean section in the local maternity hospital in the Altai region on September 17, the latest addition to a family of eight sisters and three brothers.
"We were all simply in shock," said the 43-year-old mother.
"What did the father say? He couldn't say a thing - he just stood there blinking.
"I ate everything. We don't have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes," Ms Barabanova said.
Waitemata District Health Board paediatrician Bobby Tsang said the average newborn in New Zealand weighed around 3.5kg.
"Anything above 4 or 4.5 is getting quite big. Anything above 5 would be remarkable."
The biggest baby Dr Tsang has ever attended to in his 19 years in paediatrics was a 5kg boy "a long time ago" in Northland. Babies born to Pacific Island women tended to be bigger, he said.
"Constitutionally big parents will give you bigger kids, and I think that's most likely what's happened with that baby."
Compounding Nadia's big birth size would be the well-known occurrence that mothers' babies tend to get bigger the further down the birth order, he said.
Guinness World Records lists a 10.2kg baby boy born in Italy in 1955.
A 10.8kg baby boy was born in the United States in 1879 but died 11 hours later.
- Reuters, Errol Kiong
