Why is my newborn so noisy while sleeping?

The first night home

We had spent five weeks visiting a NICU. Then she was home, in a room with us, in the dark, and she would not stop making noise.

We asked about the little sounds. Whether the kicking and arm-waving was normal. How quickly to change a nappy if you've heard her poo. Whether a light had to stay on. And then, plainly, that she was making a lot of noise and wouldn't settle.

She was asleep the whole time. It was us who weren't settling.

Newborn sleep is loud, and nobody warns you

A big chunk of it is an active phase where they grunt, squeak, snuffle, sigh, kick, fling an arm out and pull faces that look like real distress.

It sounds exactly like a baby about to wake up. It usually isn't. The single most useful thing we changed was waiting — not responding to the first sound. A lot of it resolves itself inside a minute or two, and reaching in mid-cycle is how you turn a noise into an actual waking.

Having spent weeks next to monitors that beeped for real reasons, learning to sit still through noise took some doing.

The small answers we needed that night

No, a light doesn't have to stay on. We asked specifically because she'd come from a NICU and we assumed preterm babies might need one. A dim night light is for your benefit, not hers.

Poo gets changed reasonably quickly. A wet nappy can usually wait until the next feed.

And you don't need to burp a baby who's settled and asleep. We were waking her up to do it.

What we were actually listening for

Not volume. Effort.

Grunting with every single breath, rather than now and then. Breathing that looks like hard work. The chest pulling in under the ribs, nostrils flaring wide, any pause, or a change in her colour. Those are different from a baby making a racket while fast asleep, and once you've seen the difference you stop mistaking one for the other.

When we weren't sure, we filmed ten seconds on a phone. Far more useful than trying to describe it later, and it stops you second-guessing your own memory at four in the morning.