Mothers Day Trivia: Youngest
Mother
The youngest mother whose history is authenticated is Lina Medina, who delivered a 6½-pound boy by cesarean section
in Lima,
Peru in 1939, at an age of 5 years and 7 months. The child was
raised as her brother and only discovered that Lina was his mother when he was 10.
Mothers Day Trivia: Oldest Mother
On April 9, 2003, Satyabhama Mahapatra, a 65-year-old retired schoolteacher in
India, became the world's oldest mother
when she gave birth to a baby boy. Satyabhama and her husband had been married 50 years, but this is their first child. The
baby was conceived through artificial insemination using eggs from the woman's 26-year-old niece, Veenarani Mahapatra, and
the sperm of Veenarani's husband.
Mothers Day Trivia: Most Surviving
Children
Bobbie McCaughey is the mother who holds the record for the most surviving children from a single birth.
She gave birth to the first set of surviving septuplets - four boys and three girls -on November 19, 1997, at the University Hospital, Iowa,
US. Conceived by in vitro fertilization, the babies were delivered after 31 weeks by cesarean in the space of 16 minutes.
The babies are named Kenneth, Nathaniel, Brandon, Joel, Kelsey, Natalie and Alexis.
Mothers Day Trivia: Shortest Interval Between Two Children
Jayne Bleackley is the mother who holds
the record for the shortest interval between two children born in separate confinements. She gave birth to Joseph Robert on
September 3, 1999, and Annie Jessica Joyce on March 30, 2000. The babies were born 208 days apart.
Mothers Day Trivia: Longest Interval Between Two Children
Elizabeth Ann Buttle is the mother
who holds the record for the longest interval between the birth of two children. She gave birth to Belinda on May 19,1956
and Joseph on November 20, 1997. The babies were born 41 years 185 days apart. The mother was 60 years old when her son Joseph
was born.
Mothers Day Trivia: Highest
Recorded Number of Children
The highest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the first
wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia.
Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four
sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.
Mothers Day Trivia: Highest
Number of Children in Modern Times
The modern world record for giving birth is held by Leontina Albina from
San Antonio, Chile.
Leontina claims to be the mother of 64 children, of which only 55 of them are documented. She is listed in the 1999 Guinness World Records but dropped
from later editions.
Mothers Day Trivia: On
Women and Motherhood
24.8 is the median age of women when they give birth for the first time - meaning one-half
are above this age and one-half are below. The median age has risen nearly three years since 1970.
A woman becomes pregnant most easily at the age of eighteen or nineteen, with little
real change until the mid twenties. There is then a slow decline to age thirty-five, a sharper decline to age forty-five and
a very rapid decline as the women nears menopause.
The odds of a woman delivering twins is 1-in-33. Her odds of having triplets or other
multiple births was approximately 1-in-539.
When the female embryo is only six weeks old, it makes preparations for her motherhood
by developing egg cells for future offspring. (When the baby girl is born, each of her ovaries carries about a million egg
cells, all that she will ever have).
August is the most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births
taking place that month in 2001.
Tuesday is the most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average
of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.
Mothers Day Trivia: Strange But True about Celebrity Moms and Kids
Katherine Hepburn's father was a surgeon and her mother was a dedicated suffragette
and early crusader for birth control.
Elvis Presley, was a mama's boy. He slept in the same bed with his mother, Gladys, until
he reached puberty. Up until Elvis entered high school, she walked him back and forth to school every day and made him take
along his own silverware so that he wouldn't catch germs from the other kids. Gladys forbade young Elvis from going swimming
or doing anything that might put him in danger. The two of them also conversed in a strange baby talk that only they could
understand.
Many of the sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers on the popular television show, Mr. Rogers'
Neighborhood, were actually knitted by his real mother.
Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother and to shield him from the shame, Eric grew
up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.
Mothers Day Trivia: From
the Animal Kingdom
A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
A mother giraffe often gives birth while standing, so the new born's first experience
outside the womb is a 1.8-meter (6-foot) drop.
Just like people, mother chimpanzees often develop lifelong relationships with their
offspring.
Kittens are born both blind and deaf, but the vibration of their mother's purring is a physical
signal that the kittens can feel - it acts like a homing device, signaling them to nurse.