Infant Swim Resource

I mentioned in Wyatt's 8 month update that he is taking "swim lessons." It's not actually swim lessons, but drowning prevention lessons. It's a program called Infant Swimming Resource where 6-12 month olds work one-on-one with a certified instructor to learn the skills necessary to prevent drowning in case baby accidentally falls into a pool (or any body of water)! At this age, the babies aren't necessarily taught how to swim, but how to roll over to his/her back and float until help comes (1-6 year olds learn the rollback to float in addition to swimming to the wall). This video is taken from the ISR website...

And here's a video of another 8 month old...

                                     

The program takes 4-6 weeks and because it is one-on-one everything is done at the baby's own pace depending on their speed of learning the skills and how they are handling it. Wyatt's schedule pretty much revolves around his lesson right now because they can't eat or drink 2 hours before the lesson, and the timing also shifted his naps a little bit. He is already in week 3 though and watching his progress (and the other babies/toddlers) has been amazing! He floats on his own and goes under water but he is in the middle of learning how to roll onto his back. Once the baby has all the skills learned, they have you bring them fully clothed since most babies are fully clothed when they drown and it feels different versus just having a diaper on. 

We are allowed to video-tape him at the end... they don't allow video-taping the methods/techniques they use to teach the skills. So hopefully we'll have a video up of Wyatt in a couple weeks!