9 days later....

He's so little!!

The doctor called me on Thursday and said Jacob's eating was going great and he wanted me to do 24 hour set with him, feeding him when he was acting hungry and basically seeing how feeding would go when he's at home. After the 24 hours, if he did well, they'd give him a 12 hour break where they would feed him, then I would come back for another 12 hours and if he was doing well, not getting too tired and keeping his body temperature up he could go home. His bilirubin levels were still high but coming down, so that would factor into when he could come home as well. So we started getting ready for him to come home on Sunday. We had to pass off a bunch of stuff before we could take him, including making sure we were CPR certified, make sure we could give him a bath, take his temperature, put him in a car seat and give him a bottle. Here's some pictures of us passing this stuff off.
He likes the bath until we take him out, but during the bath he's really relaxed. His hair gets really oily really fast but when it's clean it looks like feathers. We were joking that we should bring in some pomade to the hospital and put his hair into a mohawk but we didn't. This is after the bath with his hair all slicked down. He was wrapped up so tightly only his eyes were moving and Bryan kept moving around so he would follow him with his eyes.

This is his 2nd bottle, I'm not sure why we didn't get a picture of the first. Not that it would have looked any different. We have to hold him up and burp him pretty often, but he loves his bottle.
In the NICU he was next to a set of triplets that during certain parts of the day would cry a lot. I walked in about the time he was suppose to eat and one of the babies was crying pretty loud. I came over to his bed and he was like this. I thought it was funny so I took a picture.So, after I did the 24 hours with him, which was hard because I don't sleep well when I'm not at home and I really don't sleep well when Bryan's not there, so a combination of both of them wasn't fun. I didn't mind getting up when Jacob needed me since I had been getting up at night to pump, and he actually went 3 1/2 -4 hours at night instead of the 3 hours I was expecting which was nice. After the 24 hours were over, I thought I would get a 12 hour break where I could go home and sleep in my own bed, but the nurse said he had done good enough they wanted me to stay another 24 hours and if that went well he could go home at the end of that if his bilirubin was going down. So I went home, got a shower, then went back. This morning the doctor said his bilirubin was going down, so they sent us home with a bili-blanket that he has to be on till Tuesday, then his pediatrician will check his levels and see if it's going down and if he still needs to be on it. Because of his bilirubin levels he's been on light therapy so we couldn't put clothes on him, so after they unwired him and we were getting ready to go home they let me put clothes on him. Bryan's brother Thomas got him the onesie he's wearing in the picture and the nurses LOVED it. He stretched his arms and the nurses said he looked like he was shooting out his spiderwebs. But then we got home and had to put the light in direct contact with his skin, so I had to take the onesie off. So now we're home and I get to sleep in my own bed. Life is good.