Finn is 11 days old today, and continues to make slow but steady progress.

The big news of the day was the result of Finn’s follow up echocardiogram on his heart. The echo shows that the PDA (the open valve that is pushing too much blood into his lungs), while still there, is much smaller than it was before they gave him one round of medicine. So the NICU team here believes the valve is in the process of closing, and they’re confident enough in that diagnosis to start increasing Finn’s meals to 2 mL of breast milk (every 3 hours).

Finn has managed to keep us on our toes over the past few days with his breathing, as he’s had a few “spells” per day where both his heart rate and the oxygen saturation level of his blood drops quickly, and he needs a little help to recover (be it just a friendly nudge or a temporary bump in his oxygen level). Spells are relatively common in premature babies, as their brains aren’t fully developed and often temporarily forget to continue to breathe, but knowing that doesn’t necessarily stop Mom and Dad from worrying each time Finn’s monitor starts beeping like crazy when his heart rate and oxygen numbers suddenly drop. He’s been upgraded a bit from room air (which is 21% oxygen) to closer to the 30% to 35% range over the past couple of days to try to limit his number of spells.

On to happier developments: Finn has, ever so slightly, opened his left eye!  Babies that are very premature often emerge with their eyelids still fused shut, so we’ve been patiently waiting for him to open them and see what’s going on in the world. We’re still waiting on his right eye (which we hope will follow in the next few days). In any event, he can really only distinguish light and dark at this point, so we keep telling him he isn’t missing out on too much.

Finn’s milestones over the past few days include:

• On the night of Monday, August 1, Finn weighed in at 1 pound, 9 ounces — the first time he’s been higher than his birth weight.
• On Wednesday, August 3, Finn opened his left eye.