While I am a firm believer in developing healthy eating habits with your kids through learning about food and cooking together as a family, I also think it is just as important to create an active lifestyle. Creating an active lifestyle for my family has proved to be easy with an extremely active three-year-old boy. The trick has been to find things that we, as a family, are interested in.

My husband and I really love the water (scuba diving, boating, swimming) and spend most of our vacations where there are sandy beaches, lots of sun, and clear turquoise water. For this reason I thought that getting my little guy involved in swimming early would be a good choice. The great thing is that we were able to kill two birds with one stone by introducing him to a lifelong healthy activity and teaching him water safety skills at an early age. I started taking him to SwimKids in Leesburg, VA when he was eight months old and he loved it from the first SwimBabies class. We have continued the classes and now he is ready to move onto the toddler class where he will be swimming without me. It is so amazing to see how much he has learned and how proud he is of himself. Because of the classes Marco is so comfortable in the water and with the safety skills he has learned I feel better when we are around water.

If you are looking for a fun activity and lifelong skill to share with your kids, consider swimming. If you live in Virginia I would highly recommend SwimKids…the coaches are great!

Chao for now.