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.)

Landstuhl

Here's a picture of Joseph with Mama on day three in the NICU.

I feel like I should describe where we are. We're at a huge military hospital called Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. There are several US bases in the vicinity, including Ramstein Air Base, which is enormous and has (almost) everything American you could dream of (wanna Harley? you got it. And a Cinnabon? no problem.) Landstuhl, on the other hand, is its own separate post and consists of pretty much just the hospital and a few support facilities, like a library, a gas station, the community center and lodging.

The hospital facilities and staff here at Landstuhl are very good. This is the largest military medical facility outside the US. The staff has been positive and supportive. It's a nice change from the Korean nurse guilt trip "oh, your baby not feeding, not good, he losing weight.." that we got in the last Army hospital.

It's helpful, for example, that Jill is able to stay in her hospital room after being discharged. Her unit is down the hallway from the NICU. And our temporary apartment is right next to the hospital. The day care center for JR, meanwhile, is just a quarter mile away, and is very well run. When I picked up JR today he was excited to tell me that Thing One and Thing Two had visited his group and read them a book. (It's Dr. Seuss week.) :)

All in all, this is a good set up and we're glad we came here for the delivery.

Glass factory, part 2

One of the things we've learned about Europe (or at least this part of Europe) is that they believe much more strongly in Darwinism -- they're not going to save you from yourself. For example, I'd venture to say that you'd never see a tour group in the US get this close to 1000 degree molten glass..

That and we have a more litigious society.. Either way, watch out, hot glass coming through!