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Mom fires babysitter over viral splash bucket video

Posted at 10:40 AM, Jun 17, 2016
and last updated 2016-06-17 10:40:51-04

INDIANAPOLIS — A mother in Indianapolis fired her daughter’s babysitter after she saw a viral cellphone video taken at a local waterpad.

The video taken at the Greenwood splash pad has been shared thousands of times on Facebook.

The mother, Brittany Dixson, saw it online at work. She says when she first saw the video she thought, “Why would you put a child underneath so much water at once?”

But then she quickly realized that the baby in the video was her daughter Annora.

Dixson says it was bad enough that the babysitter let her 7-month-old walk barefoot on hot cement, and swung her up high on a swing multiple times. But the last straw was seeing a huge bucket of water dumped on her daughter’s head.

Worried about her daughter, Dixson took her to the emergency room to get checked out.

Doctors say Annora could have had “dry drowning” because she inhaled a lot of water at once, and could have actually drowned in her sleep because the water would have been trapped in her lungs.

Dixson says she’s grateful that a concerned woman posted the video on Facebook, and she messaged the woman to say so.

She also says the babysitter apologized and said she didn’t realize the bucket carried so much water.