KEY POINTS:
Not precocious. Didn't walk at nine months. Bowel motions normal.
Sam Morgan, TradeMe millionaire was a boringly ordinary baby, according to his mum Jo.
His Plunket book tells the story: "He was very standard, very much the average. All my kids were. If they were meant to
cry at strangers at 15 weeks they did it, all those sorts of things. I had friends whose babies walked at 9 months. Sam didn't walk till he was 12 or 13 months."
Auckland model Nicky Watson was every parent's dream - smiling, very content and gaining weight beautifully.
She laughingly suggests that, perhaps, it had something to do with her also being "breast fed on demand".
"It's like that all the through the book, I was just a very happy baby."
Watson and Morgan are among the 91 per cent of New Zealanders who were Plunket babies - their nappy habits, first teeth and other childhood milestones recorded in books that have become icons of the Kiwi way of life.
The books, and Plunket, turn 100 tomorrow. The Plunket philosophy that good nutrition and infant care equals well children became parenting lore.
In 1994, Plunket set up a free telephone advice service. That service lost Government funding last year.
It was relaunched as a self-funded service in March, and expects to take close to 60,000 calls from new parents over the next 12 months.
Plunket books have had a less chequered history, though today's advice-filled tomes are a far cry from the thin two-visits-to-a-page journals of old.
Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast's book dates from 1953. Born in Christchurch, weighing 8lbs (3.63kg), the bonny Kerry Leigh Ferrier, as she was then, had put on 14ozs (0.40kg) just over a fortnight later.
At 3 months she was taking two tablespoons of stewed porridge with scalded milk. At 33 weeks she weighed 21.5lbs (9.75kg) - well above the recommended average for the time.
Five weeks later mum was being advised to introduce her to small servings of brains, tripe, rabbit and liver pulp. At 13 months she had five teeth.
Prendergast notes that at about 14 months she was having small frequent motions. Suggested the nurse: Discontinue green vegetables in meantime.
Prendergast, a midwife, worked with Plunket for 15 years and is now an honorary life member.
She remembers Plunket rooms as being "like Post Offices. There was one in every community. And home visits were more than just about checking the baby, particularly for people in isolated situations. They were contact with the outside world".
Outgoing Plunket president Kaye Crowther says: "I'm not sure why people hold on to them [the books]. I'm a grandmother, I have three grandchildren and I still have my Plunket book, which my mother gave me when I started having children."
ACT MP Heather Roy's mother, Barbara Fraser, was a Plunket nurse in the early 1960s.
She "Plunketed" her own six children, a practice continued by her daughter, a mother of five.
Roy's Plunket book reveals she smiled at three weeks while her first word was "Dad". Flicking through her own children's books, she notes "quite dramatic" differences in the advice given to each generation of parents.
"We had a good basic knowledge but some of the advice [we were given] wouldn't be accepted today."
