re: Let's talk about swimming pool/water safety

We put a pool in when our kids were 6 months,5 and 7. Our oldest two had been on summer swim teams and were good swimmers. They are now 6, 10, and 12 and they swim like fish. So our efforts really centered around the baby.

You can never be too careful and take advantage of every opportunity to get them acclimated to the water. Put them on swim teams, lessons, water baby classes. Here are some things we did and some things I would recommend to do.

1)You and your wife's habbits are your savior or your own worst enemy.
2)Dont ever assume that your wife is watching and vice versa
3) Dont ever assume the pool is locked up or protected- check everytime you are done
4) We put a self closing, child proof locking gate between our backdoor and the pool. This added an additional layer of safety if the toddler got out of the house.
5) Get in the habit of locking the back door everytime you are inside. Get your older children to follow this and tell them how important it is.
6) Make sure you other children are watching as well and teach them what to do if the baby falls in
7) Put your toddler in a water babies class- teaches them to flip on their back if they fall in the water. We did this twice for our youngest. He could backfloat for 15 minutes. This is the single most important thing we did. It gave us piece of mind that if he fell in it would give us more time.
8) If the youngest is in the backyard around the pool a life jacket is on.

Like I said, good habits are the difference but dont ever get comfortable and assume you have done everything.

I am glad we put the pool in and the kids are in it everyday during the summer. They can all swim extremely well now