Yesterday was the two year anniversary of the worst day of our lives.

We think about Emmet every day. It’s impossible not to — there are constant reminders of him in our daily lives, not the least of which is his surviving identical twin, Finn — so it’s not as if any day, even two years later, is easy. But we’d be lying if we said certain days aren’t harder than others, and yesterday, Emmer’s “angelversary,” was one of those days.

But I didn’t start writing so I could talk about our grief (mainly because I don’t think I could do any justice to that topic after Shannon wrote so eloquently on it a year ago). No, I wanted to write something today because, two years later, I think recent life events have given us something of a coda to Emmet’s brief life here with us.

Because yesterday was also the due date for our fourth child.

Our “rainbow baby” actually joined our family back on July 5 via a planned C-section. But when we’d found out that the baby’s due date was the same date that Emmet had left us… well, that was jarring, to say the least. We eventually came to see it as another sign that Emmet would always be present with us, and when we found out (in the delivery room!) that this baby was a boy, we further commemorated that presence by naming him Grady Emmet O’Brien.

“Baby Grady,” as his big brothers Dermot and Finn call him (never just Grady, for whatever reason), tipped the scales at 8 pounds, 8 ounces — exactly 7 pounds bigger than Finn and Emmet had been at birth. Even at 37 weeks and 2 days gestational age, however, Grady arrived with a bit of extra fluid in his lungs, and as he snuggled with his Mom in the recovery room just a couple of hours after being born, his constant grunting brought various NICU staff by, until finally the neonatologist who had been in the delivery room with Emmet and Finn, and who had eventually overseen Finn’s discharge 122 days later, almost sheepishly informed us that the fact that the grunting hadn’t stopped after a couple of hours meant that Grady would have to head down to the NICU for monitoring.

What might have been a devastating situation for many people wound up being, in some ways, oddly comforting for us. Grady spent about 54 hours in the NICU (most of that time on an IV, and a little over 24 hours of that time on CPAP) before rejoining his Mom down on the recovery floor. During that time, Grady was lucky enough to be watched over by both of Finn’s “primes” (primary nurses), the nurse who helped us to baptize Emmet, and plenty of Finn’s old doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, respiratory therapists, social workers and other support staff.

Grady’s stay also gave Finn the opportunity to take a victory lap through his old stomping grounds. Exactly 1 year, 7 months and 14 days after we carried Finn out of the NICU in his car seat, he came running back in wearing his “Big Brother” shirt (before immediately pointing at his new brother and yelling “Poopy butt!”). Seeing Finn back in that NICU was a poignant reminder of just how far he’s come.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, it dawned on us that Grady’s NICU stay gave him the chance to spend time in the place where his big brother Emmet had lived and died. It’s a weird quirk of fate, but as we took our very first family picture with Grady — including the “Emmet bear” Molly Bear decked out in a “Big Brother” shirt that matched Dermot’s and Finn’s — it really did feel like there was no more fitting place for that picture to have taken place.

Grady was the first one of our kids to come home with us when we left the hospital, and he’s a healthy (and constantly hungry and sleepy and — yes, Finn — poopy) almost three week old. We think he’s going to be a big boy, and so despite the nearly two year head start, tiny Finn is going to have to start watching his back sooner rather than later.

And as for Finn: aside from his small stature putting him at a disadvantage in current and future brotherly battles, he is doing phenomenally well. Developmentally, Finn isn’t really behind the curve at all, and that’s without even giving him the benefit of the doubt of adjusting his age for his actual due date. Shannon is fond of saying that Finn is the only one who doesn’t know that he was a 25 weeker, and I swear that that’s right — he’s talking up a storm, playing imaginary baseball with whatever bat-like objects he can get his hands on in the house, and ordering the nearest adult to sit and read him whatever book he can get his hands on.

And the latter is exactly what he did when I went into his room to get him the morning of his birthday two days ago: he said “I read a couple books,” then proceeded to point up to his shelf to where the custom made The Story of my Twin: Emmet Michael O’Brien sat and said, “I read Emmet book.” And it was impossible for me not to tear up and hug him as we got to the end of that book:

Your twin I’ll always be

For I am you and you are me

So when you feel sad or just a bit blue

Take a moment and think of me

Look in the mirror and right on cue

I’ll be smiling back at you

We love you, Emmet, and all of us — Mom, Dad, Dermot, Finn and now Grady — miss you every day.

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.

Finn is 114 days old today.

Over the last couple of weeks, he’s slowly been increasing his bottle-feeding, briefly gone back on and then come back off extra oxygen, and continued to pack on the pounds (well, ounces). Finn’s now 8 pounds, 5 ounces, 19 and 3/4 inches long, and in a development just today, is trying life without his feeding tube!

He’s now gone from noon yesterday, November 13, through 3:00 p.m. today having basically taken full feedings (61 mL, or about two ounces) by bottle every three hours. His nurses switched him from preemie nipples to regular newborn slow flow nipples back on Monday, November 7, and it seems to have done the trick; Finn’s not having to work as hard as he was, and the volume that he’s been able to handle orally has steadily risen since then.  He’s still spitting a few times a day — he threw up so forcefully on one of his nurses the other day that she had to change her whole outfit! — but is continuing to gain weight despite all the extra energy it takes to eat on his own. As we mentioned in the last couple of posts, this has been the biggest obstacle to Finn coming home with us, so the fact that he’s made such great strides over the past few days is very encouraging. He has to keep this up for at least a few days, show that he’s continuing to gain weight, and pass his car seat test (i.e., sit in his car seat without having a spell for an hour-and-a-half) before we can talk about discharge, but it’s starting to become apparent that we’re not that far off.

Finn passed 40 weeks in gestational age a week-and-a-half ago, and is 41 weeks, 4 days today. And he continues to do full-term baby type stuff — tummy time, spending time in his swing, and sitting up to read books with Dad. On Thursday, November 3, the nurses let Mom unhook Finn from his wires and go for a walk down the hall — and when your baby has been confined to just four rooms in his entire life, a 100-foot walk to the nurse practitioner’s office feels better than any trip you’ve ever taken.

Aside from that… there isn’t a whole lot new to report. Finn’s last eye exam, on Thursday, November 3, showed improvement (in his right eye in particular) to the point where they aren’t repeating an exam until later this week because the ophthalmologist isn’t really concerned. He continues to get puffs twice daily from his inhaler to help his breathing, and he’s otherwise just taking some extra iron and a daily multivitamin.

It’s an old analogy, sure, but seems accurate here: while the tunnel’s been long and, at times, very dark, it’s suddenly looking a whole lot brighter in here.

Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Thursday, November 3, Finn took a break from his monitors and went on his first walk with Mom.
• On Tuesday, November 8, Finn crossed the 8-pound mark.

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.

Finn is 88 days old today.

The name of the game these days is “feeding and growing.” He’s doing the latter part quite well, crossing the 6-pound mark a week ago on Wednesday, October 12 — which means he’s quadrupled his birth weight.  The former is happening in fits and starts, however, as Finn continues to try to build stamina to eventually take over all of his feeding on his own.

Finn has “care times” every three hours, where Mom and Dad or the nurses (if we aren’t here) change his diaper, take his temperature, and get him breast milk. Every other care time, or once every six hours, we’ll try to either bottle-feed or breastfeed him.  Finn has thus far taken four full bottles — full being a moving target as his weight goes up, so 49 mL as of today — and the rest of the time, he tends to take down half to two-thirds of the bottle.  Breastfeeding has been sort of hit or miss; it often takes him a little while to get going, but when he has the stamina, he’ll breastfeed for between 5 and 15 minutes. What Finn doesn’t take by mouth gets delivered straight to his stomach via his feeding tube.

For Finn to graduate from the NICU, he’ll need to be able to eat by mouth entirely on his own — full feedings, and at every care time (not just every other).  It means that our little guy has some hard work ahead of him, and we’re hoping for a mid-November graduation at this stage.

While he may be here for another month or so, that didn’t stop one of Finn’s NICU nurses from giving Mom and Dad the discharge planning packet back on October 12… because everything else is going pretty well!  Most babies typically get their discharge planning packets at 34 weeks, and while Finn was almost 37 weeks when he got his, we’re still incredibly proud of him given all that he’s overcome.  He’s continued with his weekly eye exams (where no news is good news), is weaning off of his prednisolone and onto a twice-a-day inhaler that he can take home with him, and is still on just a bit of extra oxygen. They’re also continuing to monitor his hematocrit (it will get checked again next week) and we are hoping he can avoid a seventh blood transfusion.

And of course, Finn is continuing to plump up.  He was measured at 17.5 inches long on Sunday, October 16, and weighed in at 6 pounds, 9 ounces last night, Tuesday, October 18. Looking at him now, it’s incredible to think how tiny and skinny he was 12 weeks ago.

Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Wednesday, October 12, Finn weighed in at 6 pounds, 1 ounce — more than quadruple his birth weight.
• On Wednesday, October 12, Finn’s Mom and Dad received his discharge planning packet.

Finn is 78 days old today.

On Tuesday, October 4, Finn moved rooms for the first time since he was less than a day old. The NICU babies that need respiratory support are all clustered in rooms in the back of the unit, so Finn had been in that neck of the woods for the first 10+ weeks of his life. But having been off of CPAP for over two weeks, and having completed his second course of steroids without experiencing a significant rebound, Finn was sent packing down the hallway. He’s now moved on up (to the east side of the building… seriously!) and is, quite literally, closer to the door.

As Finn chugs right along toward full term gestational age (he’s now 36 weeks, 3 days), we’ve started moving down the checklist of things he’ll need to do before he’s allowed to bust out of this joint. Between Tuesday, October 4 and Wednesday, October 5, he got his vaccinations, took his hearing test (he passed!), and had his sixth weekly eye exam (which showed about the same results as the week before). While his hematocrit levels are still a bit on the low side, there are no imminent plans for a blood transfusion, as it seems likely Finn’s bone marrow just needs a bit of time to make more red blood cells — and they’re trying to help that process along by maxing out his iron supplement.

On Thursday, October 6, Finn had a follow up echo on his heart. The headline coming out of it is that Finn showed no signs of hypertension, which is always a concern for micro preemies given that they are born with chronic lung disease. The echo also showed that Finn’s PDA — for those of you keeping score at home, that’s the open duct in his heart that we haven’t talked about since mid-August — is still there but is very tiny, and is still expected to close on its own.

Finn checked in last night just shy of 5 pounds, 9 ounces; his weight has been up and down the last few days, as the doctors, nurses and nutritionists here in the NICU try to determine the right balance of volume and added calories to keep Finn within the bounds of the preferred growth curve for micro preemies.

The main task before Finn now is a simple, if still difficult, one: keep progressing with his feeds to the point where he no longer needs his feeding tube. It’s been slow going given the limited stamina that Finn has. For instance, on Thursday, October 6, Finn took a full 42 mL bottle, but the next day, he struggled to take down half that amount before losing his lunch all over Dad. He’s been equally up and down with breastfeeding, tending to be more awake and willing to nurse at night, but wanting to sleep instead of working to eat during the day.  This has led to Mom frequently coming back in at night to breastfeed Finn (showing some pretty incredible stamina of her own, given everything that’s going on).

Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Tuesday, October 4, Finn moved down the hall (and closer to the door!).
• On Thursday, October 6, Finn finished his first full bottle.
• On Saturday, October 8, under the watchtful eye of his older brother Dermot, Finn had his first bath (and he loved it!).

Finn is 10 weeks old today.

One of the themes of an extended NICU stay for a micro preemie is the slow but (hopefully) steady progress toward doing, on their own, all of the “normal stuff” you take for granted with a full term baby — stuff like breathing, producing their own blood, eating, etc.

If we’re running down that list for Finn, we can now put a check mark next to breathing on his own (having graduated both from the ventilator and the CPAP machine), albeit with a bit of oxygen, and producing sufficient levels of red blood cells for himself (after six blood transfusions). And in the past week-and-a-half, Finn has started to take on one of his toughest tasks yet: eating on his own.

Last Thursday, September 22, Finn breastfed for the first time. He’s breastfed once per day since then, and it’s going well!  One of the doctors said to Mom in the hall, “I heard Finn is breastfeeding like a champ!” — so we’ll take that as a good sign.

Then, on Wednesday, September 28, Finn had his first bottle from Dad. Just like breastfeeding, he’s bottle-fed once per day since then. He hasn’t yet been able to get a full 39 mL feeding through breastfeeding or bottle-feeding, though he did take down a healthy 35 or so mL when Dad gave him his bottle on Thursday, September 29. Most importantly, though, he figured out the “suck-swallow-breathe” dilemma very quickly, and so now it’s just a matter of building his stamina so he can breastfeed and bottle-feed more and more (and rely on his feeding tube less and less).

Meanwhile, Finn is still chugging right along in his CPAP-free world, and remains on just a bit of extra oxygen. He completed his 22-day course of steroids (hydrocortisone) on Thursday, September 29, and now we’re just keeping our fingers crossed that we don’t see a significant rebound. Two factors make us hopeful that he’s going to stay the course: (1) he gets a small dose of prednisolone, itself a steroid, every other day to try to help him maintain; and (2) he really, truly is getting bigger and stronger every day. On Tuesday, September 26, Finn weighed in at 4 pounds, 8 ounces — triple his original birth weight. As of tonight, October 1, Finn tipped the scales at 5 pounds, 1 ounce.

Finn is now 35 weeks, 2 days gestational age, and when he hit the 35-week mark a couple of days ago, a few things changed. He now has to sleep in his crib without the use of “barriers” (little body pillows and other items that had previously helped to cocoon him); he’s no longer allowed to lay on his stomach; and he’s expected to keep higher oxygen saturation levels (so his vitals monitor has been set to ding accordingly). The reason for all of this? Finn won’t have barriers, lay on his stomach, or be on a vitals monitor when he comes home, so he needs to start getting adjusted.

We haven’t officially begun discharge planning yet, but the fact that we’re making those post-35-week changes, talking to the nurses about the vaccinations Finn will need before he leaves the NICU, and being asked to schedule the mandatory parental CPR class — these are all good signs. One of Finn’s primary nurses said the other day that a late October graduation is certainly a possibility, so while we’re trying to temper our expectations, we can finally safely say that we are closer to the end of Finn’s NICU journey than the beginning.

Finn’s milestones over the past week-and-a-half include:

• On Thursday, September 22, Finn breastfed for the first time.
• On Monday, September 26, Finn weighed in at 4 pounds, 8 ounces — triple his birth weight.
• On Wednesday, September 28, Finn took a bottle for the first time.
• On Saturday, October 1, Finn crossed the 5 pound mark, tipping the scales at 5 pounds, 1 ounce.

Finn is 60 days old today, and will be 34 weeks gestational age tomorrow.

It’s been an eventful past week-and-a-half for our (no longer quite so) little guy. On Monday, September 12, Finn switched from the Hudson prong CPAP to the far less bulky RAM CPAP — picture moving from a tube apparatus the size of a roll of Life Savers, attached to a skintight hat with safety pins and rubber bands, to just a small nasal cannula. Finn was still pulling at the RAM CPAP — this is, after all, the same baby who pulled out his breathing tube when he was a sub-two pound two-week old — but he seemed much more comfortable overall, and despite the slightly less steady flow of the new device, he saw no real drop off in his oxygenation levels. He even moved to a CPAP pressure of 5, the lowest level, on Friday, September 16.

But Finn wasn’t done there.  Mom and Dad arrived on Monday afternoon, September 19 to find that Finn was still on a nasal cannula, but this one looked a bit different… it was just providing oxygen. The CPAP machine was gone!  We’re now more than 48 hours into life without breathing assistance, and Finn seems to be coping just fine.  He’s undoubtedly being helped along by the tapering course of steroids he’s receiving, but he’s also getting bigger and stronger each day, which means his lungs are getting bigger and stronger too.

In addition to his hydrocortisone course and his normal cocktail of Vitamins D and E, Iron and Sodium, Finn is also currently in the midst of a 7-day course of antibiotics (oxacillin).  When Mom was in for a late night visit on Saturday, September 17, she and the nurse noticed that his left arm, from his upper arm down to and including his hand, looked red and swollen — when it had looked perfectly fine earlier that day during Mom, Dad and Dermot’s visit.  X-rays ruled out any sort of fracture, blood cultures came back negative, and an ultrasound showed just a small pocket of fluid on the back of his left hand.  It started to improve almost immediately, and the current antibiotics course is being seen out just in case this was some sort of cellulitis (which does seem unlikely).

That blip aside, it’s pretty routinely been steady progress for feisty Finn. On Sunday, September 18, he crossed the 4 pound threshold for the first time, and he weighed in last night at 4 pounds, 2 ounces. He’s hung out with his older brother Dermot three times now… well, if you can call Dermot only spending about 10 minutes in the room and otherwise rampaging through the NICU “hanging out”.  All in all, Finn still has a long way to go before he’ll be ready to come home — his due date of November 3 is the earliest he could conceivably graduate from the NICU — but he’s made an incredible amount of progress in his eight-and-a-half weeks, and we are so very proud of him.

Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Monday, September 12, Finn switched from Hudson prong CPAP to RAM CPAP.
• On Friday, September 16, Finn reached 1 ounce per feeding for the first time.
• On Sunday, September 18, Finn tipped the scales at 4 pounds for the first time.
• On Monday, September 19, Finn graduated from his CPAP machine.

Finn is 50 days old today.

One thing that we have found during Finn’s NICU stay is that when you have a baby born as early as Finn was, you develop a greater appreciation for the little things that you tend to take for granted with full term newborns. We talked a couple of weeks back about how great it was to hear Finn cry (even if we should be filing that one under “Be careful what you wish for!”), and this past week, Finn took a couple of steps forward that make him seem less like a micro preemie and more like the growing, healthy 32-week gestational aged baby that he is.

On Thursday, September 8, Finn moved from his isolette (incubator) into a crib, and he started wearing clothes. He had been in the isolette from Day 1, as it gave him the help he needed in controlling his body temperature; that’s also why he’d been limited to just wearing a diaper. But, as with a lot of things, Finn growing bigger and stronger only helped matters, and the nurses decided on Thursday that the time was right to give him a shot in his big boy crib. At the same time, Mom took the opportunity to put Finn in a onesie (one that said “Tiny but Mighty” on it), and with the new onesie and swaddled in a blanket, Finn has kept a steady temperature right in the 98.6 degree range.

Finn’s battle to free himself from all breathing assistance remains an uphill one. A blood transfusion on Tuesday, September 6 (his sixth, but first in more than three weeks) didn’t have any sort of miraculous effect on the baseline pressure requirement for his CPAP, which had been bumped back up to 7 the previous day, nor his oxygen requirements, which had ticked up into the 35% to 40% range. Wary of any more regression, the NICU team suggested another round of steroids, this time a 22-day course of hydrocortisone, which is a bit less intense than the dexamethasone course he did previously. That started on Thursday, September 8, and while we were told that it might take 4 or 5 days to see the full effects, Finn is already back down to a CPAP of 6 with oxygen requirements of 23% to 25%. We’ve even discussed trying to lower his CPAP to 5 over the coming days — which is the lowest level.

Also on Thursday, September 8, Finn had his second eye exam. His right eye remained stable at Stage 1 ROP, while his left eye, which had been deemed “immature” previously, progressed to Stage 1 ROP. It’s something that will continue to be monitored, and Finn will have another exam in the coming week.

Finn is now up to 3 pounds, 10 ounces and gets 29 mL of breast milk every 3 hours.

As detailed above, Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Thursday, September 8, Finn moved from his isolette into a crib.
• On Thursday, September 8, Finn started wearing clothes for the first time.

Finn is 44 days old today.

On Saturday, September 3, Finn met his older brother Dermot for the first time. And the meeting actually went better than Mom and Dad expected! Dermot climbed onto Mom’s lap while she was holding Finn, pointed to his baby brother and said, “Baby!” and then later pointed at him and said “Finn!” He then proceeded to open and play with the race cars that Finn “bought” for Dermot.

Finn, having sized up his giant older brother, clearly decided that he was going to need to bulk up to survive in this family — and that night he tipped the scales at 3 pounds for the first time! This means it took Finn exactly 6 weeks to double his birth weight, and he’s started looking a bit chubbier to Mom and Dad. Mom even thinks she’s seeing signs of a double chin… or it could just be because of the chin strap they’re using to keep him mouth closed for the CPAP. In any event, when they weighed him last night, Sunday, September 4, he was 3 pounds, 1 ounce.

As for other developments, it turns out that we might have jinxed Finn ever so slightly with our last post. His oxygen requirements have increased just a bit over the past few days, and he’s generally sitting in the 30% to 33% range at this point — but he’s still on a CPAP pressure of 6, and his heart rate is still fairly steady in being a bit on the higher side, but not constantly tachycardic.

We do expect that he’s likely going to need another blood transfusion, and while this means that Finn isn’t quite where he needs to be from the standpoint of sustaining his own blood production internally, the upside is that a transfusion should hopefully moderate both his heart rate and his oxygen requirements.

Repeating the above, but Finn’s recent milestones include:

• On Saturday, September 2, he met his older brother Dermot for the first time.
• On Sunday, September 3, he weighed in at 3 pounds (1370 grams) — or double his birth weight.