Or was that the baby torturer?

The past week has been rough.

I have tried to follow Tizzie Hall’s routine to the letter. When Luca has woken up at 6am I have fed him, burped him, rewrapped him and put him back to bed. Then twenty minutes later, as the book demands, I have woken him up, fed him again, burped him again and attempted to keep him awake until his next scheduled sleep.

Tizzie claims that by doing this my baby will stop waking at 6am and learn that 7am is when he is supposed to wake up, and so on throughout the day. Well, it hasn’t worked and it is starting to remind me of sleep torture, where prisoners are repeatedly left to fall asleep before being instantly woken up again. I wonder if this makes them highly punctual inmates?

I guess if I persisted with the routine for long enough Luca would eventually figure it out. Either that or he’d tell me all his innermost secrets. But the real killer with this book is the fundamental assumption that you are able to tell what type of cry your baby is crying. I can only speak for myself, but this being my first baby I have no freaking idea which cry is what.

What I do know is that for as long as I can leave him, Luca can cry. One day he cried for an hour straight before I gave in and picked him up. It sounded like a protesting cry, which Tizzie says should be ignored, but surely leaving him for that long had to be unhealthy.

It seems that opinions on Save Our Sleep (and other similar books) are totally divided. Online forums are littered with comments from the Tizzie lovers and haters. Those in favour of Tizzie claim she has given them back their sanity, those against brand her as a torturer. Some in the later camp even go as far as saying that her methods can cause brain damage, depression and serious psychological damage.

While I’m confident Luca will make a full recovery from his week at baby boot camp, I have no intention of continuing with Tizzie’s methods. I’ve never been a fan of routine myself.

The baby whisperer

“It’s all about the routine”, a friend recently told me.

Her three month old baby had gone from waking five times during the night, to sleeping through, in just over a week of being on said routine. This seemed totally miraculous and too good not to try, so the next day I went out and bought the book, Save Our Sleep by Tizzie Hall.

It seems Tizzie, aka the International Baby Whisperer, is something of a baby mind reader, or cry reader as she puts it. She claims to have discovered her gift as a child of nine when out walking a friend’s baby. When the mother discovered young Tizzie’s talent her career path was forged. Years later, after moving to Australia (Tizzie was born and grew up in Ireland), she wrote the book that will, for the next week, dictate my every move.

Tizzie’s method is not for the faint hearted. There is a strict routine to follow including set feed, sleep and play times. Scheduled expressing times (what the?) and even instructions on which boob to use at particular times of the day (is this a joke?).

I get the feeling that this book is going to accompany me everywhere else I’ll have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.

One thing is for sure, there is going to be a lot of crying taking place. Tizzie tells us that it is OK, and even necessary, to let a baby cry (and cry for as long as is humanly possible) so long as it is only a ‘protesting cry‘. If it is an ‘emotional cry‘, and you leave the baby you can, according to the book, “cause psychological damage and stress”.

So, by the end of the week I will have either trained my nine week old baby to sleep, eat, play, poo, wink, smile and frown according to the uber strict routine and without any crying (either ‘protesting’ or ‘emotional’) or I will have caused him serious and irrevocable psychological damage.

I’d be silly not try really.