Cooper at the tanning salon

Ok it's not really a tanning salon but a remedy for Bilirubin ( http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/bilirubin-15434 ). I'm happy to say that Cooper's doing better but he's still at the salon until tomorrow morning.

During our visit to MGH, however, we found out something surprising...Cooper had grown 3 inches in 3 days. I started doing the math and determined that at this rate he would be 547.5 feet by age 18. Certainly troublesome for a family that only owns a 22.6 cubic foot refrigerator. Obviously humans don't grow at a linear rate of 1 inch per day, however, I suspect that Cooper is still going to be a big kid. The question is, how big?
Mom is 5' 11.5" and dad is 6' 1". If I applied an average of our heights, then Cooper is destined to be about 6' tall, however, anecdotally kids always seem taller than their parents and it's likely a result of many variables. I decided to do some online research to see if I could find some more "legitimate" answers.

I came across a utility on About.com called "Height Predictor - How tall will your kids be?" http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/usefultools/l/bl_height_pred.htm
How Perfect!!! Of course there were a few caveats about accuracy that preceded this exercise such as: "Your child has a 68% chance of being within 2 inches and a 95% chance of being within 4 inches of this predicted height. Keep in mind that other factors may influence your child's growth, including his overall health and nutritional status." Heck, it's easy to predict a height that has an 8 inch spread. As soon as I read that I should have stopped wasting my time but I was still curious and moved forward. His predicted height came back as 6' 3"--at least it confirmed my anecdotal evidence that kids often become taller than their parents. But how can two people shorter than 6' 3" can produce a taller kid?

I looked at another article on Nature.com that described a human height study involving ~63,000 individuals. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v40/n5/abs/ng0508-489.html
In that study they indicated that there are 54 variables that influence height. I have no way of telling whether or not those 54 factors were included in the About.com height utility but if they were, each factor (if weighted equally) would average to 0.037 inches of that 2 extra inches of growth (beyond the tallest parent's height). I'm probably simplifying this study too much but I guess my take away is that there are a lot of variables affecting height and one cannot manipulate them all enough to produce a substantial growth difference beyond what is already genetically inclined.

When it comes down to it, I don't really care about his height. At this point I just want a healthy Cooper that likes to sleep between midnight and 6am. Is that too much to ask? :-)