Congrats on seeing some activity with your site. Our site is quickly approaching the 1 year mark and still suffers the effects of the Sandbox. But, we are making consistent revenue from month-to-month from other traffic sources. Google is a big fish, but they aren’t the only game in town, with a lot of hard work, you can get quality traffic to your site without Google’s help. Of course, we are waiting to be released from the Sandbox so that our rankings (and revenues) can jump up.
Your comment about being indexed and the Sandbox…I don’t believe there is any relationship between the two. Google performs different tasks when their bot visits your site, sometimes it comes to look at the home page and leaves, other times it explores your site’s links. If you are using a Google sitemap, you should be getting more of your pages indexed. After the Jagger update, our pages indexed was cut in half, down to the 500s, and other webmasters seem to be experiencing the same thing. Anyway, indexing should be independent of the Sandbox, it is actually more closely tied to your PR. The higher the PR, the more often Google visits, the more visits, the more changes for deep indexing (or something like that).