A New Day (12/06)

This was it...the 3 month mark. Hannah was going to leave our bed, move to her crib, and sleep through the night. We loved having her sleep with us, but we desperately needed sleep. The magical 3 month mark is what kept us going up to this point.

December was a fun month. Hannah started getting more vocal, babbling different things, including my favorite word "da da." We also took her on her first road trip this month, to Monterey, to meet our friends Erez, Maya and their baby Lia.

Towards the end of the month, we were invited to Rusty and Patti's holiday party. This was going to be our first night out (you can tell by the pictures in the slide show), and also Hannah's first night in her crib.

Without much ado, we put Hannah to bed in her crib and left for the night while Maria's parents babysat. When we came home, Hannah was still sleeping. When we got into bed, Hannah was still sleeping. And she didn't make a peep until after 6am the following morning.

We had done it. The rough part was over and we could now gradually start getting back to normal. That first night of sleep was just wonderful, as it was the first tangible moment where we could feel that things were going to get much much better.

Looking back over my blog entries for the first 3 months of Hannah's life, I realize that sleep is a constant theme in my writing. Both our sleep (or lack thereof) and Hannah's sleep. In retrospect, this was the hardest part of adjusting to life as parents. It wasn't hard to love Hannah, or change a diaper, or learn how to soothe her. But it was very challenging to figure out how to do all these things, and handle the responsibilities of our own lives, without much sleep. I cannot possibly overstate how much better we started to feel after Hannah made it through her first night without waking up. It really felt like a new day from that moment on, so much so that when we look at pictures from those first few months, we hardly remember those long days and nights in the beginning of Hannah's life.