Day 23-guess who's home?

Happy Easter everyone!  We had an especially happy Easter in my family, as today I have brought home Daniel.  It happened a bit fast, and this is how it went:  after I decided to do the exclusive breastfeeding, I started with three feeds a day, then after about two days he started rooting and waking up at night wanting to suck.  I came in at 2 am to do a feed, and stayed in the parent room until 8 am for another feed, but the nurses woke me up to do the 5 am feed as well, so on Friday I ended up with six feeds by breast (with some SNS help, about 10cc's each time).

Daniel ended up pulling his NG tube out that night, and the nurses asked me if I wanted to give it a try and just breastfeed only, with no further NG feeds.  I tried it, it worked, and after 24 hours they asked me if I wanted to room in in order to go home.  After another 24 hours of rooming in with him, they sent me home.

It is BY NO MEANS easy to feed him, as he gets very sleepy for about four to five of the eight feeds, and I have to struggle to wake him up every ten minutes in order to get him to take in 45 g, which is his needed amount.  We are on a very strict schedule:  feed, pump, sleep, repeat every 3 hours.  So far we did well for the six hours spent at home.  I have confidence now that it was not a mistake to walk out of the hospital with my baby boy.

His monitors came off last night, and I stayed awake for several hours making sure he is still breathing.  As I woke up every hour or so, I worried each time that I would find him dead from a spell of apnea.  Every time he was still breathing, I got a bit more confident.  Initially I tortured myself with statistics of SIDS in preemie boys that co-sleep with their mothers, but as the day went on, I decided to trust my instincts and hope for the best.  Just in case, we did get a bassinet, in which my precious baby is sleeping, but I have a feeling that, as I become more confident, he will end up in my bed just like Emma did.  (Emma ended up in my bed an hour after my C section, in fact I think I got her in the recovery area, and she never left since).

I am more cautious with Daniel for now because he is so small, and also because I don't want to rock the boat and change his habits right as he started feeding on his own 48 hours ago.  However, as we both gain confidence in each other's abilities, I cannot see him not ending up in the family bed, along with his sister and the cat.