Musings: Why is a baby’s size compared to different types of fruit?

As a first-time mum, I was so excited to get weekly pregnancy newsletters about how my baby was developing.

I wanted to know when he or she would start kicking and when he or she would start growing hair and of course, the baby's different sizes throughout pregnancy. One thing most mums will be familiar with is how most pregnancy-related articles and books describe the size of a baby...the fruit scale of measurement in case you're new to this. I've always found this hilarious and it got me thinking. Why don't we use fruit to measure other things? Just think of the conversations.

"How tall are you?" "Oh, about two and a half watermelons."

It's also made me wonder why we don't use other scales of measurement for babies. During my last pregnancy, my husband and I discussed this and as video game addicts, we decided to do a gaming scale of measurement. 14 weeks, the size of a Gameboy cartridge. 34 weeks, the size of an NES console. When I was pregnant with my daughter, she started kicking the same week I was informed that she was the size of a banana. For some reason, she had a habit of kicking whenever I would rest my hands, or a bowl of cereal, on my stomach. I would tell her off by saying "Now you stop that and be a good banana". The name stuck and Banana is still her nickname. There's just a couple of questions still on my mind. How did someone come up with a fruit scale of measurement? Was there a meeting? A brainstorm of different objects with the outcome, 'fruit is the best'. I love the idea of it coming out of a work suggestion box. Everyone struggling for weeks to figure out how to measure these babies and then they get the 'fruit scale' suggestion and think 'wow that's brilliant, problem solved'. Mostly I'm wondering these things to gauge if anyone is interested in hiring me for my video game scale? Seriously though, I think it could really take off.