A can of soda weighs in at an arm-breaking 12 ounces. A large slice of pizza, maybe inflicting only a sprain, weighs around 8 ounces.
Nash Keen, when he was born 19 weeks premature, weighed in right between those, at 10 ounces.
And now he’s a smiling, bouncing, engaging baby boy of one year old.
The Christian Institute in the United Kingdom marked the birthday for Keen, born to an Iowa family at 21 weeks, one day earlier than the previous Guinness World Record holder.
“He spent the first six months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Stead Family Children’s Hospital in Iowa, but is now home,,” the institute reported.
“His mum Mollie thought they would lose him,” the report said.
“I had to take it one day at a time. I focused on the small victories and leaned hard on my support system,” she explained.
“Being in the NICU as long as he was, you’d think that he would be, you know, more fragile and stuff. And he’s not. He’s a very determined, curious little boy, and he’s just all smiles all the time,” she continued.
Baby Nash was born at 21 weeks and survived. The Left calls babies like him a “clump of cells,” but we know he was always a person worth protecting. Praise God for this miracle. pic.twitter.com/ISltfwd76k
— Students for Life of America | Pro-Life Gen (@StudentsforLife) July 24, 2025
He was able to leave the hospital in January.
His dad, Randall, said, “He’s surviving and he’s thriving, and he’s doing really good. So we’re very proud of him.” Nash is reported to be growing into a “strong, happy baby who is hitting developmental milestones.”
Pro-life publication Life News noted, “This is little Nash Keen. He was born at just 21 weeks gestation and weighing a mere 10 ounces. No clump of cells. No ball of tissue. And Nash just earned the Guinness World Record as the most premature baby to survive!”
At Guinness World Records, the organization noted the child was known in the family as “Nash potato.”
The family’s hometown, Ankeny, made a big deal of his birthday: Gifts included 70 outfits, educational toys and a mountain of diapers.
His mom noted they need those.
At birth, he was 9.5 inches long and weighed less than a grapefruit.
Neonatologist Amy Stanford said, “Around the one-month mark, we all began to breathe a little easier. While we knew Nash still had a long journey ahead, that was the point when we started to feel more confident that he had a real chance of going home. It was a subtle but powerful shift – from day-to-day survival to long-term hope.”
In a statement online, the hospital noted the parents, just a year earlier had lost a little girl, McKinley Keen.
