The procedure for looking after a baby is nowhere near as difficult as you imagine. So long as you’re putting stuff in one end and clearing it up as it comes out the other, the rest mostly takes care of itself. I’ve stopped feeling for Izzie’s pulse every thirty seconds, and I sometimes go a whole hour without checking she’s still breathing. Providing she’s fed, winded and in a clean nappy, there’s not a lot that can go wrong.

So far, so simple. You’d think.

But putting stuff in one end and clearing it up as it comes out the other can be a friggin’ minefield. And when stuff comes out the end it’s meant to be going in, and stops coming out the other, it throws everything out of sync.

We were following a wonderfully modern, touchy-feely thing called ‘demand feeding’. It is exactly as it sounds: you feed the baby when she demands to be fed. Because babies aren’t machines. Sometimes they want a light snack, sometimes a five course dinner followed by an all-you-can-eat buffet. And sometimes they want to take it in their mouth just so they can spit it back out.

I think it’s a fundamentally decent principle. On my travels I met a dreadlocked German girl in a hostel/hippy commune above the ocean who lived by the rhythms of her body. She ate when she was hungry, slept when she was tired, and spent the rest of the time knitting beanie hats, as far as I could tell. She told me to get rid of my watch, listen to my body, because my body knew best and would never steer me wrong. She seemed so in tune with the vibrations of the world I thought I’d give it a try.

I lasted around three hours. Despite what Lizzie might tell you, my body doesn’t talk much, or perhaps I’ve lost that connection with my instinctive animal nature. So I’m all for Izzie keeping in touch with her body’s desires.

Her natural inclination is to cluster feed. That’s where, instead of leaving a few hours between feeds, she wants to feed, feed, feed, with only fifteen or twenty minutes between, and then sleep for five hours, before waking to feed again. Left to her own devices she’d cluster feed all morning, sleep all afternoon, cluster feed again from tea time to early evening, then settle into more regular feeds overnight. It might not be ideal for everyone, but it worked, and other than some griping in the evening, we had a very contented baby.

Except for the constipation. We give her laxatives morning and evening, but still her belly goes rock solid, she lifts her legs, sticks out her tongue and turns purple as she strains to squeeze out a thumb-sized nugget. It’s horrendous to watch, actually, and no matter how many times I put her on her back and do bicycle movements with her legs, it doesn’t seem to help.

The Health Visitor came a few days ago and told us that as we’re no longer breastfeeding, we shouldn’t be demand feeding anymore. Instead, we need to get her into more of a routine, feeding her three or four ounces of formula every three hours. She’ll feel more secure and it’ll help with the constipation too.

Pardon my French, but what utter, total bull-plop!

The last couple of days Izzie’s morphed into a wild beast that claws at our necks, rips glasses from faces, breaks necklaces and grabs collars while screaming at the top of her lungs, and she hasn’t pooped once. Because she doesn’t want to feed every three hours. Between each feed she’s unsettled and agitated. And at night she’s inconsolable.

Friday I fed her at ten and it took until one in the morning to settle her. She woke up three minutes later as it was time for her next feed. Afterwards, she was so unhappy it took till half-two and skin-to-skin for her to stop screaming, whereupon she burped and threw up the whole of the last feed over my bare chest. And because she’d vomited, she was now insatiably hungry again. Showering sticky milk vomit out of your armpits at three in the morning is sure to put you in a bad mood, especially when she’s up at five screaming again!

Last night was just as bad. I’m averaging three hours of broken sleep a night, and perhaps an hour during the day. They say you reach a point where if someone offered you £1000 or a full night’s sleep you’d take the sleep. There’s no contest: I’d take the money and use it to hire a nanny for a whole week of nights.

Since making this change to feeding, Izzie is miserable, Lizzie’s confidence has taken a massive leap backwards, and I’m on the verge of hallucinating about fluffy white pillows and bed linen. Perhaps, in the long term, getting Izzie into a routine is a good thing, but from where I’m sitting, the ‘chaos’ of her natural bodily rhythms was far easier than the vomit and tears of this artificial routine.