ANAHEIM : Toddlers OK After Rescue From Pool

Two Anaheim toddlers who nearly drowned in a pool but were saved by their mothers’ quick thinking returned home from the hospital Wednesday in good condition.

The boys, Aaron Chavez, 2, and his cousin, Nathaniel Orduno, 2 1/2, were taken off oxygen at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange and released into the arms of their smiling parents.

“He’s the same old kid but a little more mellow right now,” Florencio Orduno, a 25-year-old construction worker, said as he carried his son in his arms.

Both boys had been left unattended for less than five minutes Tuesday morning when they pushed open an unlocked sliding glass door, crawled past an unfinished fence around the back-yard pool and fell into the water trying to retrieve a toy horn, their parents said.

Lisa Orduno, 23, and her sister, Mary Chavez, 33, were in the kitchen of Chavez’s home sipping coffee when they took note of the silence and thought something was wrong.

Mary Chavez ran outside first, saw both boys floating face down in the pool and jumped in quickly to pull out her son, Aaron.

“I thought: ‘I got to get them out as fast as I could and do as much as I could,’ ” she said. “Their faces were pale, their lips were blue. . . . All I wanted to do was hear them make noise. Lying still like that, I thought they were dead.

“It’s a scary thing to see, especially when it’s your own children. I had to do something to bring them back.”

Lisa Orduno plunged into the pool next to grab Nathaniel and tried frantically to recall the cardiopulmonary resuscitation class she once took but never completed.

She laid her son on the deck of the pool, blew into his mouth and pumped his chest twice until he cried. Chavez followed her lead while Orduno called 911.

“I was scared. I knew I had to do something,” Lisa Orduno said. “I was trying to remember as much as I could about CPR and start working on them.”

When the boys arrived at CHOC, Nathaniel Orduno was in stable condition, said Dr. Paul Lubinsky. But Aaron Chavez had fluid in his lungs and was almost put on a ventilator before he started to recover.

“They were lucky. Another five or 10 minutes could have made all the difference,” Lubinsky said. “These two great moms knew where their kids were.”

Thirty to 35 near-drowning victims are brought to CHOC each year.

Before heading home, Chavez promised to raise the poolside fence to six feet, and both mothers completed a one-hour CPR class at the hospital. “I want to be sure I know what I’m doing,” Mary Chavez said.