We arrived home with our baby girl one week ago today. And Sarah seems to be making the transition to the Eastern Time Zone pretty quickly!
Overall, it’s been a pretty smooth transition. But we expect one of the biggest challenges ahead to be related to Sarah’s sleep (as it was for Ethan). In addition to being held a lot, both Ethan and Sarah were accustomed sleeping next to the foster mothers on the floor at night.
While it was a challenge, Ethan made the transition to sleeping in his own crib and developing healthy/strong sleeping habits. In fact, we have rarely had to get up for Ethan during the night in the nearly 21 months we’ve had him after about the first week and a half. We hope Sarah will this transition, too, but I have a hunch that it will be a bigger challenge for her!
Sarah is sleeping in her crib after she falls asleep in our arms. It doesn’t always go smoothly. For example, tonight, Sarah really fought being in the crib (and it happened to be *my* turn to take her up!). She usually does better at night than at nap times, but tonight, it took about a half hour, and a couple attempts of putting her in the crib (after she had already fallen asleep both times), interspersed with heavy crying, before she finally stayed asleep!
But, thankfully, Sarah has been sleeping through the night fairly well for the last few nights, going to bed during the evening and getting up for a bottle early in the morning (about 5:40 a.m. this morning, after going to bed at 7:30 p.m. last night), then sleeping another hour or so. We’ll she how she does tonight, after finally going to sleep around 8:30 p.m. (Edited to say: Sarah slept 11.5 solid hours overnight, so we’re very pleased!). This is, of course, another fluid situation.
Other potential challenges for Korean adoptees tend to be (1) car seats and (2) baby formula. The little Sarah has been in a car seat, she’s handled it well. We also brought two cans of baby formula powder home with us. We went through the first one, then started mixing the second one, half and half, with formula bought locally (as we did with Ethan). That seems to be going well, too.
So, as I said, while there are, and will be, challenges, overall, the transition has been a good one and things are going very well.
For now, though, I just hope that Sarah (and Ethan, for that matter) cooperates with the end of daylight saving time and we can actually get our extra hour of sleep tonight! 🙂