It's been a couple of weeks since I've blogged -- we have been super busy! Zoey is constantly delighting us with her little personality and the new things she does. She is definitely grasping at everything and moving it toward her mouth. I think she's pretty darn close to sucking her thumb for comfort, she just hasn't quite figured out how to stick out her thumb yet -- she just puts her whole fist up to her mouth and slobbers all over it. She's also exercising her legs a lot more by "standing up" on our laps. Sometimes she works at it so hard that she grunts and yells, which we think is quite funny. We'll have to see if we can get some video of that for you.

She's been wanting to face forward more in the last week or so, looking out into the world. Her very favorite thing is to be facing outward in our arms or in the sling while we stand on the porch and watch the wind blowing in the trees across the street, listening to the cars going by. That is how we've been spending the normally-fussy evening time, and she doesn't make a peep. Just big blinky eyes, taking it all in... and drooling. :-)

We had our first visit with our baby doctor yesterday, Dr. Sam, who is a naturopathic physician. We really like her demeanor, and Zoey seems to like her a lot too. She spent an hour with us, getting to know Zoey and inspecting her head to toe. Zoey now weighs 12 lbs 12 oz, is a little over 24 inches long and is in the 65th to 75th percentile in all of her measurements. Because my insurance doesn't cover naturopathic doctors, and also because Dr. Sam doesn't do vaccinations (mostly because many of her clients choose not to do them at all and the vaccines would just expire in her refrigerator), we will probably also have shared care with an MD pediatrician that my insurance does cover. Apparently a lot of people around here do it that way.

Next week we will be traveling! Our first big trip! We will be driving up to Seattle on Thursday evening and staying with Jason's brother Lee and his wonderful family, and then on Friday morning we will catch a flight to Minneapolis. My dad will pick us up and we'll drive another 200 miles north and spend the week with my family. My brother and his wife will be there too (coming in from Kansas), along with Mike's son Matthew and their new baby Elizabeth, who was born just two and a half weeks before Zoey. The grandparents will have so much baby time they won't know what to do! We're looking forward to getting lots of pics of Zoey and Elizabeth together.

Hope you all are enjoying the last days of July. Happy birthday, bro!