About Marybeth

Thank you for your interest in Infant Aquatics, a survival swim program for infants and young kids, ages 6 months to 6 years old. The program strives to teach your child age-appropriate water survival skills, which includes rolling from a face-down position to a face-up survival float and/or to master the swim-float-swim sequence. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends survival swimming for kids as young as 1 year because drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children between the ages of 1-4. My goal is to do whatever I can to prevent child drownings and to safely and gently guide children through the process of learning swim survival skills.

I was born and raised in Florida My mother began teaching me to swim at 6 months old and that began my love affair with the water. I spent half my childhood in a pool training year-round on a club swim & diving team and competing nationally in springboard and platform diving. During the summers, I life guarded in between my morning and afternoon practices. I hold a Bachelor of Business in Accounting and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I started out my health care career as a paramedic before entering nursing. I've worked on an ambulance, in a Level 1 ER/Trauma Center, and in a NICU. I'm a former BLS, ACLS, and PALS instructor. Sadly, I have responded to the scenes of child drownings. It's more common than you may think and a tragedy I wish no child or family ever experience.

I am a wife to a loving Army husband and a mom to 3 young kids. We live on a military base in New Jersey. I've been blessed to be a stay-at-home mom to our 3 young kids the past 7 years and have treasured the time with them. While we were stationed in Florida, my older kids attended survival swim lessons. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of survival swim instructors in New Jersey. As I attempted to teach my youngest myself this past summer at the public pool, I realized an overwhelming number of kids in our area did not know how to swim. I believe swimming is a critical life skill that every adult and child should know. This prompted me to seek becoming an instructor and led me to Infant Aquatics. I wanted to learn from the best so I traveled to Longmont, Colorado to train 140 hours under Judy Heumann (founder of Infant Aquatics) and Margie Herman (Certifying Instructor) at their state-of-the-art Swim Float Swim facility. I feel blessed to be taught by them and armed with the skills to teach a child to self-rescue in water. If even just one life can be saved, it will all be so worth it!

Infant Aquatics skills can and have saved lives, but please note that no swim lesson program and no level of swimming skills is a guarantee against drowning. The number one drowning prevention is direct supervision of your child. I look forward to the opportunity to teach your child and to share my love of the water with them.