The Peanut Gallery: Baby Zae is still perfect.

Sure enough, almost four months into her life the Zaeby is still a dream child. She is sweet, content, increasingly good at self-soothing, and transitions fairly easily among her (still mostly family) caregivers.

One handy new trick is sucking her fingers. For a while it mostly took a lot of luck for her hand to wind up close enough to her mouth for this to be accomplished, but in the past 2 weeks or so she's become a pro at manoeuvring the pointer and middle finger (almost always of her right hand) into position.

Also, on Nana's birthday (May 17) she rolled over (front to back... and then back again) for the first time.

Like Mazie at her age, she seems to have developed a strong preference for being able to see out into the world... the Ergo carrier doesn't work as well anymore, but she's pretty consistently calmed by being carried facing forward. She has also become increasingly interactive, giving lots of big smiles and starting to show an interest in toys. Her big sisters have really enjoyed this. Mazie has been fairly adoring and content with even the "cute blob" phase, but Athena has seemed eager to be able to play a bit more. It won't be long.

Zae also had her first big adventure recently: we rode on an airplane to North Carolina! It was a great trip. Ahya came with us, and we stayed with the Smiths for a week while I met with Duke friends and colleagues and then attended the RWJ Health and Society Scholars Annual Meeting in Chapel Hill. It was a great meeting, and I was so grateful to Ahya for being Zae's constant "attendant" for the entire trip. Ahya was actually one of about four grandmothers milling around the conference with young babies, touring around Chapel Hill and then popping in so their mommies could feed them and send them on their way.

During the week we also squeezed in a trip to Greensboro to see the Archers (neighbors from my childhood days in New Jersey)...

and lunch at Fearrington Village with Great Uncle Dave and Great Aunt Geni.

It was wonderful to spend time with Matt, Allison, Tobin, Evan, and Lauren, and so sweet of them to share their new home with us for a week. The kids were very enamoured with Zae and each doted on her in their own way. Lauren was particularly amusing... one of the first things she did was to grab one of Zae's hands and (to her credit, fairly gently) do a "You're hitting yourself! You're hitting yourself!" routine. This would have been funny on its own, but it happens to be EXACTLY WHAT ATHENA DOES with Zae (see above note about wanting her to be more interactive). Lauren also has "fast running shoes" like Athena and seemed to have a similar energy and passion overall. It will be interesting to see how they interact during our trip to Maine in July!