The morning after Saffy went into the paddock we had to get on the road by about 7.15am to go to sleep school. In order to make it through the day, when Small Z wakes (for the final time) at about 6.30am or 7am, M will take her and I’ll get another hour or so of sleep in. It is my lifeline. And this was the second day I hadn’t had it. Ugh. I was a mess of sad eyebags.

With peak hour traffic horror, we got there at about 8.30am - and Small Z should have been back in bed for a nap fifteen minutes before that. So she was already overtired. It took another hour or so for them to process us. There was only one other baby and her mum there with us - staff were off sick, so it was a slow day. I didn’t know how things were going to work, but I had read in a few places online that the Queen Elizabeth Centre used some Elizabeth Pantley methods (for those of you not in baby-land, she is the author of The No Cry Sleep Solution. I had been dabbling with the book and it’s suggestions, but M hadn’t read it.

Anyway, I did not expect to have to put Small Z, who had been up for FOUR HOURS (which was the longest she has ever been awake - two hours and a bit is her limit) in a cot in a darkened room, and leave her alone there as she ’settled herself’. Just a short tangent at this point. Small Z was rocked to sleep inside me, as I did all that walking around the back paddock for six months. She was rocked to sleep when she came into the world as a continuation of this. And she she is still being rocked (and when I say ‘rocked’ I mean wrapped up and walked up and down in our arms), but it needs to stop - because my wrist and my shoulder have said ENOUGH, and she needs to learn how to get there on her own. />end of tangent

So our baby wrangler (let’s call her, um, Deloris) told us all the things we already knew, helped me to put Small Z down in the cot. We said a firm ‘goodnight’ and left the room. Ha ha ha. Poor Z lay there for a bit, but was so out of her head with sleeplessness that she just started to scream. Deloris helped me to try the ’settling strategies’ - patting her, patting the mattress, shooshing, blah blah blah. Z yelled regardless. It was hard, and stupidly pointless, because I knew that she was absolutely not going to suddenly and miraculously realise how to get to sleep.

Both M and I didn’t last very long. I couldn’t see the point of it (I can feel you, all those people out there just shaking their heads while mumuring…”no pain, no gain”) but I know my baby. I know she has never had to get herself to sleep, and now, in a strange place and all on her own - how was that going to help her toward the holy grail? It wasn’t. Anyway, I grabbed her. She was very upset. I had to settle her in the normal way, and did not feel at all bad. Deloris thought I was a pussy. Deloris hadn’t really helped. She kept saying things like “She’s manipulating you…” and wore lots of clanking jewellery that didn’t help when she patted the mattress.

I could go on, but it has taken me a week to write this (I have backdated it to the appropriate time for historical accuracy) and, no surprise, I am too tired now to bother. Basically we had an information session, Deloris told me she would try and get me in for a five day stay, Deloris suggested that M and I needed counselling (I can only assume this was because I was at the end of my tether with no sleep, having buried Saffy the day before, M and Z were stressed and we were somewhere that was more hardcore than I’d thought - and because M was pretty underwhelmed by dear Queen Elizabeth and I’m sure we snarked at each other a few times) and that Small Z was a manipulating little thing. Yawn.

The second nap was even more disastrous and Small Z ended up beside herself. I told Deloris that thinking this approach was going to work was ridiculous, and it was stupid to even bother with trying it, particularly as we were only there for the day. Deloris pretty much wrote us off as not one of her success stories. M and I wrote very detailed feedback forms. When we got home we made a pact to stick with our No Cry Sleep Solution book. We are making a little progress, but things are still a bit of a struggle. Small Z is growing so fast, and what works one day will not work a few days later.

The follow up phone call from the Queen Elizabeth Centre was really the only other good thing about it (besides the free tea and coffee, and their excellent salad sandwiches). The lady I spoke to was far more sympathetic to our situation, and I really think that we would have got more from the whole experience if she had been our wrangler on the day. Sigh. I told her what we were doing, and she said it was great, and all we could do was stick to it and keep going. So there you go. The day after sleep school horror we had visitors, the day after that I had to work, and the day after that I had to work. By Wednesday I was so wiped out I had turned into a troll, and M had to mind Z so I could go to the osteopath and op-shop some zen into myself. I’m sick of being a grown up.