Drunk Babysitter Serves as a Reminder

Photo of Woman Throwing Up in a Toilet

There’s a certain feeling of safety with the knowledge that your children are home with a babysitter. After all, most parents are very cautious about the people they entrust the lives of their children with, so they have in a way earned that security blanket.

Except sometimes that’s not enough.

From WMUR:

An Exeter [New Hampshire] baby sitter has been arrested and accused of being drunk while baby-sitting, police said.

Julie Reid, 30, was charged Wednesday with six counts of endangering the welfare of a child for the incident on Sept. 9.

Police said Reid was drunk while taking care of six children, ages 3 to 12, at a home in Exeter.

One of the children called police at about 9:50 p.m. that night.

This reminds me of why I don’t leave my seven-year-old with anyone other than my parents or siblings. My tendency to inherently mistrust people is not always a good thing, but it’s times like this that I’m glad for it.

In a country where the majority of companies give piss tests to make sure that the Wal-Mart cashier isn’t toking up on off-hours and anyone working in a public …

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Charlie Sheen’s Disposable Goddesses

It’s wasn’t Charlie Sheen’s possibly deranged, potentially BS and certainly attention-seeking behavior that has disturbed me over the last week or so. It’s been the way in which this behavior has been greeted largely as a joke — with phrases like “winning” and “tiger’s blood” being used as punchlines and Sheen in general being greeted with smirks and a record number of Twitter followers. One man even immortalized Sheen’s insane media blitz with a particularly ugly tattoo which he said was the talk of the bar after he got it done. Perhaps more confusing and disappointing was Jezebel blogger Jessica Coen posting an article about how she “Played Phone Tag with Charlie Sheen,” pretending she was interested in a job as a “Goddess” at Sheen’s newly-christened Sober Valley Lodge, even sending a photo …

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Chad Evans, Convicted of Murdering Toddler in 2000, is Looking For Sympathy

Photo of Murdered Child Kassidy Bortner

When I became a mother at the age of seventeen, I could suddenly relate to news stories.  The Oklahoma City bombing.  Susan Smith drowning her little boys.  Everything suddenly touched me on an entirely different level when it hit me that I was suddenly responsible for raising a child—no, helping a child survive, when you think about it—in a truly frightening world.

The 2000 murder of 21-month-old Kassidy Bortner, though, is the one that will stay with me forever, a situation I still think about a lot.

Although I was …

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The “Only Child” Isn’t an Evil Egoist After All

photo of the only child myth cover of time magazine pictures

From The New York Times comes a study that seeks to undo the popular notion that children without siblings are emotionally stunted or inherently selfish, particularly when compared with the alternative.

The theory seems logical enough — you take a child who is used to being the center of attention at home, place them in a huge group of other children in daycare or at Kindergarten, and suddenly they have a hard time making friends or learning how to share the teacher’s attention or their toys.

I am technically the oldest sibling in my family, but growing up my step-siblings only visited on the weekend. So for five days a week, I was practically an only child. What does that make me, exactly?

And what about only children from single parent homes? Or only children with nannies? Or only children who have been in daycare from the time they were toddlers?

As for the children with siblings, what about siblings who are ten or fifteen years apart? Can you fairly say that they were able to socialize one-another as peers? Or siblings from different marriages, or siblings who don’t get along? There’s so many different cases, with so many different variables.

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