Finn is 100 days old today, and is just 3 days short of being 40 weeks gestational age.

We know there are a lot of people reading the blog, and we apologize for the infrequent updates recently — but the truth is, there isn’t a whole lot new to report. Where the beginning of Finn’s NICU stay was marked by respiratory support, head ultrasounds, heart echoes, blood transfusions,  steroid courses, etc., his “feeding and growing” stage has been reliably… well, uneventful. It’s frustrating in some ways, given that Finn has made so much progress toward coming home but is, like most micro preemies, finding the last hurdles the most difficult to overcome — but of course, after all that he’s been through, “uneventful” is far from a bad thing.

Finn’s biggest news of the last two weeks is a development that’s happened just today: he’s been in a trial off of his extra oxygen since 3:00 a.m. this morning, and as of tonight, he’s still making do without it.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed that this is a permanent development, but even if it isn’t, we know he’s not far off, as the amount of extra oxygen he’s needed has been steadily decreasing over the past couple of weeks.  On Monday, October 24, he finished the last of his tapering dose of prednisolone, and now just gets puffs from his inhaler twice daily.

That leaves (for now at least) just the leads measuring Finn’s heart rate and breathing rate, his pulse oximetry sensor measuring his oxygen saturation level, and his feeding tube as the “extra wires” that Finn is sporting.  Combine that with his continued growth and his improved color — his hematocrit, when measured on Thursday, October 27, was up, so no more worries about a pale baby needing a blood transfusion! — and Finn looks more and more like a healthy full-term baby.

The only negative over the past couple of weeks is that Finn’s eye exam on Thursday, October 27, showed a slight worsening in his right eye. While it seemed that we were over the hump and that his eyes would only get better from here on out, the nurse practitioner assured us that if the opthamologist was really worried, they would have scheduled a follow up for a few days later (and not a full week). So we will get an update this Thursday and are keeping our fingers crossed.

Finn is now just shy of 18 inches long and tipped the scales at 7 pounds, 8 ounces tonight — exactly five times his original birth weight.  He’s packing on the pounds despite having bouts of reflux recently that have led to him spitting up at least once or twice per day, though the spitting isn’t unexpected for a newborn (and particularly a newborn on a feeding tube). Finn is doing his best to eat on his own, but is generally taking about half of a bottle every other feed and getting the remainder, including every other full feeding, through his tube. He’s done a pretty good job breastfeeding and is even starting to do back-to-back feedings with bottles at times, but in both cases, only when he has the energy to do so.

It’s probably going to be at least a few weeks before Finn reliably has the energy to eat entirely on his own, without the help of the feeding tube, and this is now his biggest remaining hurdle to coming home.  It will be difficult for us to see their due date come and go this Thursday with him still in the hospital, but we had prepared ourselves for this from the beginning, and we’re still hopeful that our original goal of having Finn home by Thanksgiving is a realistic one.

In the meantime, Finn “celebrated” his first big holiday in the NICU: Halloween! He had two costumes, and of course, Mom and Dad subjected him to photo shoots in both of them: a skeleton costume, and a Star Wars stormtrooper outfit that read “Storm Pooper” and complemented Dermot’s Yoda costume (and his cousins’ Leia, Darth Vader and Amidala costumes). We promise that photo evidence will be available in time.

Finn’s milestones over the past couple of weeks include:

• On Monday, October 24, Finn weighed in at exactly 7 pounds.
• On Monday, October 31, Finn weighed in at 7 pounds, 8 ounces — five times his birth weight.
• On Monday, October 31, Finn started a trial off of the nasal cannula that had been giving him extra oxygen.