Dad and the boys

Here are some pictures from yesterday of me and JR and Joey. (I think Jill may have schemed to put Joey in that outfit to match me..)

Snowy Krakow

We woke up to a pretty good snow fall this morning. This is what the Rynek looked like around 11am. Is it Easter or Christmas?

Welcome home Joey

Joseph is at home now in Krakow. He had his last check-up on Friday of last week and then we drove back from Landstuhl in two days, arriving home on Sunday. He was 2.3 kg (5lbs 1oz) at his check-up and has continued to feed well. You can start to see him filling out a bit already.

Friends have been helping by bringing by meals this week. His Grandma Parker will be here next week. This little boy's going to be getting a lot of love. We're doing well and we're very thankful to everyone for the many forms of support.

JR meets Joey

A video from Tuesday, the first time JR met his new little brother. :)

Father-son time

While his mama has been spending time with baby Joseph in the hospital JR has been getting a lot of quality time with Dad. (That's also a recent change.. about two weeks ago JR decided that he prefers to call me "Dad", although "Dadda" and even "Tom" occasionally come out of his mouth.)

Anyway, despite staying in a one-bedroom apartment away from his familiar surroundings, we've been able to find many fun things to do. Now that we have kids we appreciate the morale welfare and recreation (MWR) programs that the military runs. These are things like library programs, community pools, and family activities and organized sports and rec leagues. These programs are especially good overseas where more people rely on the base for community support than they would stateside.

Some of the things we've done recently are a Dr. Seuss day at the Landstuhl base library last Saturday, swimming a couple times a week at the pool/water park at Ramstein, story time at the library (see pig nose), and even an impromptu tour of the fire station at Landstuhl.

JR was over the moon about this last one. He couldn't believe he was getting to see and touch a real live fire engine. The firefighter was great with him and even gave JR a souvenir fire helmet. Way to make a kid feel special. :)

Getting bigger

Baby Joseph is still in the NICU, but he's getting bigger every day. He passed his birth weight on Tuesday of this week and is putting on about 30-40 grams on average per day. As of last night he was 1870 grams.

He still has his feeding tube in, but is nursing also. The doctors and nurses want to start weaning him from the feeding tube in the next few days. His IV came out about five days ago. He sleeps a lot of course and sometimes doesn't have much energy to nurse, but his trend is in the right direction. No real sign yet on how much longer he'll be in the NICU. Perhaps by the end of next week he'll be ready to go. He's the boss.

I took this picture on Tuesday, when he was eleven days old. The NICU nurses sometimes prefer that he sleeps on his tummy to help with digestion. Normally you wouldn't do that with a baby. Even I know that...

His hair is kind of a sandy brown right now. It seems to me that he has more of it than JR did when he was born. Joey's eyes are darker. Jill thinks they'll be brown or hazel. One thing you can say is he's definitely got his father's ears. (We Grahams are good listeners.. hahaha.)