Finally getting him home

After the trauma of the birth, we wanted to get him home as soon as possible.

Unfortunately Anthony was classified as too small (5 weeks early and only weighing 4 pounds 5 ounces) to leave hospital.

So we had the unexpected pleasure of visiting him in Frimley Park Hospital 3 times a day for the next 2 weeks, while he stayed nice and warm in the SCBU intensive baby unit sunning himself under the ultra-violet lamp to fight off the jaundice that seems to affect premature babies.

For the first few days Anthony had to be fed via a nose tube .. which he kept pulling out ... and he really did look so vulnerable and pathetic that we felt terrible leaving him there each evening. But there was nothing we could do but wait until he grew a little stronger.

Debbie was stressed with the visiting .. and Anthony was too small and tired .. to be able to breast feed successfully. We tried the "expressing breast milk" trick .. unfortunately it never seemed to be a satisfactory way to stimulate the natural milk production and 95% of the time Anthony was much happier being fed powdered milk from a bottle .. even he did have to put up with his new Dad pouring some into his eyes - with my first attempt!

Finally after 2 weeks the Doctors said we could take him home .. and very proud parents we were .. even if I got no sleep that first night - spending most of it wide awake listening to him breathe .. and hoping he wouldn't stop.

For the record Anthony was officially a premature baby and throughout all his early years he was smaller than the average Apgar score
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apgar_score

and in the lowest centile region
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/height-weight+chart

Despite all that - He's now almost 6 feet tall and weighs 12 stones... so he did eventually catch up with his peer group.