If you think you've heard daycare nightmares before, wait until you hear this one. An 8-month-old baby girl was found with a mouse in her mouth at a New Jersey daycare. Yes, a real mouse was IN her mouth. I'll give you a minute to absorb that ... or go gag.
According to ABC, the baby's grandmother, who works at the facility, found her granddaughter, Alanah Barba, there with the mouse, which was "most likely a dead mouse," and alerted her daughter. I'm not certain how no one knows if the mouse was really dead or not (what did they do with it after pulling it out?), but the baby's mother has since pulled her daughter out of the preschool. She also says her daughter has been sick since, and that someone should have been supervising her daughter more adequately.
Her outrage is absolutely understandable. I can't imagine the hours I would spend worrying, shuddering, and vomiting if something like that happened to one of my children. But, at the same time, I can understand how it could happen at a preschool, how it could happen anywhere, and I don't necessarily think the school is to blame.
The fact is that sometimes rodents and pests infest the cleanest, most conscientious places (the school says an exterminator had just visited the school two weeks prior). Though we have a service that sprays regularly for bugs and keep a quite clean house, we still find roaches in our midst at my home. It's Florida; it happens. It's disgusting, and we do everything we can to fight them, but still sometimes they get in. You can only spray so much and set so many traps. Thank all that is good that I never found my daughter chomping on one, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that I could have at some point.
If a rodent somehow got into this school during this cold month and passed away, I can see how no one might notice it there amongst the other toys. It may have very well looked like a toy.
The school's director, Kiburi Tucker -- a father of five children -- seems genuinely distraught by the incident and is doing everything he can to prevent a repeat. He told ABC: "This was an isolated incident, I was really hurt by this, it could have been my child."
Honestly, it could have been a lot of children in a lot of places.
Can you see how such an outrageous incident could happen at a daycare, or do you think the daycare is completely at fault?