Strollerderby : connecticut

Woman Arrested For Breast Feeding At A Bar

Brett Singer — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Allanah Earley went to a Durham, Connecticut bar to have a couple of drinks. Nothing wrong with that, right? But the 36-year-old brought her baby. Hey, lots of us think that's fine as well. Then she started breast-feeding the baby, who is seven weeks old.

Two new acronyms have popped up as a result – DWB (Drinking With Baby, from NBC Connecticut) and BWI (Breastfeeding While Intoxicated, from ParentDish). BWI works better, I think. The official charge is "risk of injury to a minor", which sounds pretty, um, minor. At the moment, Earley is free on $10,000 bail.

Imperfect Parent asks, "Wonder where the breastfeeding advocates stand on this issue." Well, it's generally thought that drinking alcohol while breast-feeding is a bad idea. Especially if you literally drink alcohol WHILE YOU ARE BREAST-FEEDING. Like, have a couple of drinks, feed the kid, have another shot, and so on. That's what Allanah Earley is accused of: The Middletown Press says that when police interviewed Earley, she was visibly drunk, and admitted to officers that she'd had seven drinks. I'm guessing even the strictest La Leche Leaguer would suggest formula in that situation.

Poor kid. Even without the breast-feeding, mom's got some problems.

One report says that bar patrons called the police when Earley left the bar and "wandered out into the cold" with the baby, eventually finding her way to a friend's house, where she kept on drinking and breast-feeding. (Ah, reminds me of my college days… sorry, not funny.) In other words, the "concerned customers" didn't make the call while Earley was at the bar.

Would you do something if you saw a mom drinking and breast-feeding her baby at a bar? It's trickier than it sounds, I think – one the one hand, she has a right to do what she wants as long as it's legal. But as she becomes more and more intoxicated, the baby could be in danger, right? I'm not sure what I would do. How would you handle it?

Source: wfsb.com, others

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Toddler Dies Playing with Loaded Handgun

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:40:00 GMT

According to Jason R. Matteau’s MySpace page, his main interest is “shooting rifle and pistol” and his greatest fear in life is “losing his son.” It’s impossible to imagine the hell he must be going through, now that his greatest fear has come to pass as a direct result of his interest in guns.

While at home with both of his parents and his baby sister, Matteau’s two-year-old son, Wyatt, founded a loaded handgun. He picked it up and the gun went off, shooting a bullet through Wyatt’s head.

Detectives have ruled the death accidental, which seems clear judging even from a quick peak at the parents’ MySpace pages, both of which are covered in photos of their two children and messages such as “I have the best children in the world.” However, the investigation continues into possible wrongdoing on the part of the Matteaus, since Connecticut state law prohibits storing loaded handguns in a place where anyone under 16 might be able to find them.

Hot (Water) for Teacher Facing Porn Charges

Patti — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:00:00 GMT

Boing Boing has an interesting piece on a Connecticut teacher who faces up to forty years of prison time for exposing students to Internet pornography. According to news reports, Julie Amero was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor because, prosecutors claim, students viewed pornographic websites that Ms. Amaro accessed. Ms. Amero maintains that the sites were accessed by adware on the machine in question.

The reader comments at Boing Boing are informative and unsettling, noting that the prosecution's case against Ms. Amero may have been built on a false understanding of how browsers save information about visited websites, and that the school's culpability for having had expired licenses for their filtering software should have been addressed.

This case, which goes to sentencing next month, could prove to be an unfortunate precedent not just for educators, but for parents as well.