Are newborn hiccups normal?

It was just after midnight

Ari got hiccups and we started asking questions. What's the best position. Does patting help. Which of those is better. How long before they stop.

We also managed to ask how long burping takes and then correct ourselves — sorry, I meant hiccups — which tells you roughly what state we were in.

Eventually the question came back to us: is anything else going on? And the honest answer, once we actually looked at her, was no. She just hiccups. That was the end of it.

She wasn't bothered. We were

This is the thing we'd want to hand to anyone standing over a cot at half past midnight. Watch her face rather than the clock.

Hiccups look like something happening to a baby. Most of the time they aren't distressing her at all — she's doing it the way she did in the womb, and she has no opinion about it. The distress in the room was entirely ours.

Once we noticed that, the whole thing deflated.

You can put her down mid-hiccup

We genuinely didn't know this and had been waiting them out. You don't have to. A comfortable baby goes down flat on her back and hiccups her way into sleep, and it's fine.

The useful stuff, if you want to do something: hold her upright a while, pause a feed if she seems unsettled by them, one gentle burp if you think she's swallowed air. That's the list. We were cycling through positions like we were tuning a radio, and none of it was doing anything.

When we'd have asked someone

Not about the hiccups themselves — about what came with them. If she'd been genuinely upset by them rather than indifferent, if they'd been getting in the way of feeding, if there'd been frequent vomiting alongside, or any change in her breathing or colour.

On their own, at midnight, in a baby who's otherwise happy: they're just hiccups.