Water Safety & Prepper Skills

This is not the post I was going to make today, but personal events on the 4^th of July have caused me to change plans a bit here.   We’ll continue my journey into prepping on another day.

One of the most important (and sadly overlooked) parts of prepping is learning skills that can make you more self-sufficient.  Too that end, one of my many lists is a “list of skills” that I think I and my little group need to have.   Clearly getting some basic lifesaving skills is on that list and honestly even if your idea of preparedness is “I want to make it through a killer weekend”, getting these basics is something everyone should do.  

Yesterday we were at the pool with my kiddos and extended family.   At one point in the afternoon, all the adults where sitting by the pool while the kids were playing in it.   My two-year old slipped off the step and into water over her head.  Thank God we were paying attention and I had her out of the water in a matter of seconds.  

I’ve always wondered at stories on the news about kids drowning while their parents/other adults were nearby, but I have a lot better insight into this now.   The shocking thing to me was how silent the whole event was.   Watching TV/movies we see drowning as a loud affair of splashing and flailing around in the water.   This is not at all how it happened, she slipped without a sound under the water and while I could see her kicking and working her arms to swim, it was all beneath the surface and not a sound was made.   If we hadn’t been keeping a very watchful eye, we would not have known until too late.  

All my kids (including the two year old) take swim lessons.  Growing up in Texas you’re around water way too much to not know how to swim.   Looking at it afterwards, I was happy to see she was doing the right motions and might have made it back to the step herself, but clearly I wasn’t going to wait around to see.

The other eye opener here was the behavior of my other kids.   My six-year old saw this happen and immediately started to swim over to help her sister.   While I’m certainly proud of her for wanting to help, this could have compounded things with the two-year old dragging them both down.   This is despite actually having talked about this very situation in her swim class not more than two weeks ago.  So we had to have another talk about needing to yell out to get an adults attention.

While this was a “non-event” in the sense that she was underwater so short she wasn’t even coughing/out of breath and immediately wanted to go back to playing, it reminded me of the things I haven’t learned yet.   I couldn’t have done CPR, or any other live saving procedure if I had had too and my kids need better training on what to do when they see a problem.

Long story short…make sure you get some basic lifesaving training for you and your kids as soon as possible and PLEASE watch your kids closely if you’re out in the water this summer.