Finn is 124 days old today, was exactly 4 months old yesterday, and most importantly, he came home 2 days ago.

A couple of days later, it still feels surreal. In some ways, we’re like first time parents all over again, nervously watching our baby every second, constantly wondering if he’s eating enough, spitting too much, and sleeping the right amount.

On the other hand, this is untrodden territory for all of us — Shannon, Dermot, Finn and me. Finn has already been here for 4 months, and we’ve sat by his isolette/crib every day hoping that his lungs would someday be strong enough not to have to rely on a ventilator, that he wouldn’t need surgery on his heart, that he would show no long-term effects from the small amount of bleeding in his brain from when he was born, and seemingly countless other things. The transition to worrying about “normal” newborn stuff now is a weird one, to say the least.

Finn’s actual graduation from the NICU was, in the end, pretty anticlimactic. He passed his car seat test last Tuesday, November 15, and was actually for a time on track to come home last Friday, November 18. The NICU team wound up keeping him for a few extra days when he kept spitting up, and after adding a dose of Prilosec to Finn’s daily routine helped to cut down on the spitting, Finn was deemed good to go.

That today was Thanksgiving, and that Finn made it home in time for the holiday that we’d been so hopefully eyeing since back in July, was not lost on us. On this, Finn’s first Thanksgiving, we have so much to be thankful for.

Of course, Finn’s graduation is bittersweet. We’ll very much miss the doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, respiratory therapists and other supporting players who quite literally saved Finn’s life. These people have spent more time with Finn than anyone but his parents (in some cases, maybe more time than his parents), and they very much feel like family to us now.

And, of course, Finn coming home is a painful reminder that his brother Emmet never will. It’s probably unfair to Finn that every milestone he achieves will, at least for a little while, be tempered by the realization that his identical twin brother isn’t here to share in that experience; it’s something we’ll have to deal with as a family, and hopefully as time passes, we’ll learn the best way to balance celebrating Finn and remembering Emmet.

For now, we’ll just take things one day at a time. After just a day shy of four months in the NICU, Finn came home, and we’re not sure there’s a family out there that has more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than we do.

Finn’s last NICU milestone was:

• On Tuesday, November 22, Finn graduated from the NICU.