Into the Wild

My friend Shelley is a stay-at-home mom with four children under six, including her youngest who spent the first 8 1/2 months of her life in the NICU and who continues to need lots of ongoing medical attention.

Shelley also has the soul of an adventurer. It can be tough for an adventurer to be so utterly grounded, no matter how much she loves her children.

The other day, as she sat with her baby in the hospital, waiting for her to wake up from her 37th trip to the OR, she wrote on her blog about tapping into her reserve of memories of past adventures across the globe to sustain her, but still wishing she could enjoy the exhilaration of, say, driving through the desert in a jeep.

I thought, "Hey, I have a jeep!" and "Hey, I know a place nearby that feels exotic and worlds away!" So I secretly made arrangements with her husband and then whisked her away into the wild for an hour or two to feed her adventurer soul.