Featured Image Credit: KSBW 8
Topics: Food and Drink, Alcohol, Parenting, US News
Mia Williams
Parents say their toddler was 'swaying' and 'falling over' after restaurant staff accidentally served the two-year-old alcohol.
A little girl was left with dangerously high blood alcohol levels, after she was served alcohol at a restaurant by accident.
Parents Noemi Valencia and her partner noticed that their daughter had started 'slurring her words' after drinking what they thought was apple juice, at Fujiyama Japanese Restaurant in Salinas, California.
The family dinner took a turn when their little girl became 'wobbly', and mum Noemi felt the urge to have a sniff of the drink she had been given.
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It was served inside a normal children's sipping cup with a lid.
And nothing seemed out of the ordinary until later, when the toddler's behaviour became alarming.
The mum quickly realised that it wasn't apple juice that her daughter had been served, and smelt very much like an alcoholic drink.
A manager at the restaurant said a server had accidentally given the two-year-old house-made cooking wine - that had been mislabeled as apple juice.
Very, very rookie error.
Quickly after, Noemi and her partner rushed the little girl to A&E, where tests revealed her blood alcohol level was 0.12%, nearly twice the legal driving limit for adults.
Noemi told broadcaster KSBW 8: "She was swaying, she was falling over, she was leaning on walls, she couldn’t hold her head up, she was slurring her words."
Following the incident, Noemi urged the restaurant to take more care in their kitchen moving forward.
She said: "Take proper precautions and how you store or label things properly so that this doesn't happen to anybody else."
She also sent a warning to parents to make sure they 'taste what’s served' to their children, following the upsetting incident.
The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control said it was aware of ‘reports’ of the incident and is working with local authorities to investigate.
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, consumption at a young age affects the human body very differently to those of legal age.
They reported that alcohol consumption as a toddler can interfere with normal brain development.
However, despite the two-year-old's symptoms being unnerving for her parents to experience, the little girl managed to sober up and made a full recovery from the accidental alcohol consumption.