Newborn moaning and squirming constantly in sleep

[Songsrae]

I've a 7 day old baby who will moan, cry out, grunt and strain all night long when laid in her moses basket. All with her eyes still closed. My first baby had really bad reflux so I'm trying not to let this cloud my judgement and have me jumping to conclusions.

I've read lots of posts online that this is normal and is most likely due to an inability to pass gas/poop easily. However, it seems uncommon for this to happen the entire night. Did your newborns do this?

The last thing I want is to convince myself it's reflux if this is normal behaviour and send us down the long and painful path of allergy testing and meds the way we did with our first. I assume if she was in real pain she would start crying properly and wake up?

Hoping it's just normal newborn behaviour?

This was EXACTLY our baby boy!!!

Our boy is 4.5 months old now. His trapped wind and gas started very very early on - first few weeks. I have no doubt it is ‘just’ trapped wind. My partner was convinced it was reflux.

He use to throw his legs in the air and slam them, he would throw his body side to side, he would grunt all night longggg from the early weeks. I was exhausted.

we tried everything, NO gas/colic drops worked at all. We tried gripe water. Infacol. Please don’t rely on these because I would get so frustrated when they wouldn’t work.

if you’re not using them already, get the MAM anticolic bottles if you’re formula feeding. They reduce air in the bottles. What formula are you using? We started on MAMIA aldi formula but switched to HIPP organic as it was gentler on his tummy. At around 3.5 months we switched back to aldi once his trapped wind reduced

For the trapped pumps (we also has bad constipation with him) the ONLY thing that was a quckfix were Windi’s. They seemed very scary, especially to use on such small babies but essentially you put a little short tube up their bottom and wind will come up. Or poop for us! Hold it in for 30’seconds. They are EXTREMELY safe, you can buy them from boots so that eased my worry.

Lastly, please know that they will grow out of it very soon. My boy was such an active sleeper because of his trapped wind, so much grunting at night but it genuinely start to ease at 14 weeks so just persevere as patronising as that sounds. I honestly felt there was no end in sight.
The only other thing that helped was tummy time. Lots of burps and pumps would come out. We tried all the massages recommended but tummy time did help

no one I knew was going through this, I googled everything!