As some posters have noted above, these people aren’t remotely representative of the typical vegan.
I have to wonder if they’re mentally ill.
After hearing the father talk, I’m leaning toward really really really fucking stupid.
Where was that, exactly? IMO, vegans are mentally unbalanced, kinda by definition. 
I was raised on a soy formula back in the 1960’s due to an intolerance to cow’s milk and my mother not breastfeeding. I survived the experience, no doubt due in part to receiving sufficient quantities of said formula to sustain life. However, there is a difference between soy milk and soy-based baby formula.
I expect today’s soy formulas to be an improvement over the old ones, but the truth is babies are pretty resilliant if given the most basic fundamentals. Breast milk might be best, but if it’s not available people can survive on alternatives.
I’ve never had kids of my own, but I can usually tell hunger cry from tired cry from anger/frustrated cry from cry of pain or fear. The ability to make this distinction varies from adult to adult, and experience certainly is a factor, but it’s not at all unusual for folks to make those sorts of distinctions.
Hey, don’t knock scheduling; it can be an absolute lifesaver to any parent of multiples! Remember, you’re not dealing with just one kid’s demands anymore, you have to juggle two or more. What do you think happens if the kids want to eat at different times? When do you think mom gets the chance to feed herself and get a little bit of sleep, so she can produce more milk? Hardly a “duh” issue, if you stop to think about it.
The idea, of course, is that it’s a flexible, rather than strict, schedule, and you have to be perceptive to whether your kids are getting the hang of it (if not, go back to ad-lib feeding for another few days before trying again). Otherwise, mom ends up feeding babies constantly (especially if the multiples want to eat at different times) and doesn’t get a chance to, oh, eat or sleep (both of which are generally considered useful for successful lactation).
With preemies (as multiples often are), you run into other issues such as fortifying breast milk (pumping and then adding a small amount of powdered formula). Feeding multiple infants ad-lib while trying to pump enough and fortify it would be absolutely prohibitive, so scheduling in cases like this is a must.
Luckily, preemies often come home “pre-scheduled” from their stay in the NICU (as ours were), so it’s not too hard to keep that going.
I was thinking back that the hungry cry did not stand out to me, but then I remembered we tried to feed her before she was upset to the point of crying especially in her first weeks. There are plenty of signs of hunger before crying. Letting her eat before she was upset made breastfeeding easier for me. No engorgement and latching on was easier when she was not upset.
I have known people who raised their children as vegans, and they had healthy children. This couple is not typical for vegans in my experience.
Okay, thanks, I’ve been trying to figure out what the heck an “abandoned and malignant heart” is supposed to be. Do they explain this to the jury?
Now given that your interpretation of that phrase is correct, then I don’t see how what they did is murder. They were not indifferent to the life of their kid. They just had foolish notions as to what was the best way to keep their kid alive.
-FrL-
There was a similar case in New Zealand around 5 years ago, where a 6 month old died based on his diet - the parents got 5 years each for manslaughter (site looks biased, but the article is from the New Zealand Herald ):
But I think their case was a little different, in that they choose to hide him and avoid the medical advice given, based on their religion (Seventh Day Eventists). So I guess that’s a clearer case of negligence.
We were supposed to keep a log? Really? Who has time for that when you have a baby?
When the baby was hungry, we fed her. It worked pretty well.
With my first one, I kept the log pretty faithfully…for about 2 weeks. Which side she started nursing on, whether we switched, how long she nursed, wet/dirty diapers, etc.
It became just another source of stress for me and I went with the more intuitive and self-trusting thing.
Those early days, though, I was still convinced that the hospital had made a mistake letting us just walk out with her, as though we knew one iota about caring for babies.
Oh, I remember - my twins recently turned 3 ;).
The NICU nurses lectured my husband on feeding our son when he was discharged (our daughter was able to come home with me). I thought it was utter B.S. However, I rarely managed to get out of my pajamas in the early months, and fell asleep on the potty more than once.
So, hey, if it works for you, more power to you. 
I think I posted about this earlier in the thread…don’t remember for sure. I kept a log with my first baby because she was gaining weight slowly. With the current baby, it hasn’t seemed to be a problem, so I’m just feeding him when he’s hungry. He’s basically hungry all the time.
Now that I think about it, its gotta be more than ignorance- I know a lot of extremely stupid people who have kids that didn’t starve to death.
But are those people trying to feed their kids a restrictive diet? This case is very sad. These people had to be complete nutcases, with a good helping of ignorance and paranoia thrown in.
It totally makes sense that they’d have been around for a long time. I guess I’m mostly surprised that in all my health food/organic food market shopping I’ve never come across a nutrition section for tots. It’s like this huge gap in the “product knowledge” center of my brain. :smack:
It’s in that aisle the rest of us don’t go down unless we need trash bags, I think.
Why in blue blazes is this thread giving me a mental picture of Jamba Juice? ><
(my sympathies to the non-batshit-crazy relatives of that poor child.)
Congratulations! We’re still chugging along at 3+ months (corrected age; 5+ months chronological). The light at the end of the tunnel is still pretty dim…
What did the NICU nurses tell your husband? Our discharge instructions were basically, “Feed every two to four hours”, but at that time, it was much more likely that we’d have to wake them up to feed them at 3:45 than that they would wake up hungry sooner. (At one point, though, both jaderabbit and I passed out exhausted and were awakened by the JadePazuBunnies yelling after five hours had passed since their last feed. Oops.)
We also had to do the pump’n’fortify feeding method, so it was very important that we had some semblance of predictability for feeding times, or else we probably would have had to switch to formula exclusively (which would have been a waste of good lactation).
It’s working very well, thank you. 
I didn’t want to hijack this any further; I just took exception to the implication that scheduling was for idiots.
Every time I read the title of this thread, BTW, I can’t help but read it in sort of a “caveman voice.”
Like there’s this primative tribe called the Vegans, and they’re asking me, “Should we kill the baby?”
-FrL-