How to Get to Heaven

Have I mentioned I don't typically do things the easy way? Have you noticed a pattern, too, when Chris leaves town? There was my broken arm when he left for Ethiopia in January, the opening up of my incision and subsequent emergency surgery while he was on a plane to Tennessee in April, and last week we had to tear out a wall of our house to treat it for termites--just days after Chris left for Kenya for a month.

Not to mention this new chemo. Because there's nothing like going through chemo while your husband is halfway around the world and only available on a satellite phone. It costs $10 a minute to talk to each other, so we basically say, "Hi, love you, still alive, bye," twice a week and leave it at that.

Just to up the ante over here, the universe threw in triple-digit temps (it's supposed to hit 117 in Phoenix this weekend), and I found not one, but TWO giant water bugs (official name, I'm sure) in our backyard yesterday. One was still living; I had to do a double take because I thought it was a leaf walking, it was living up to its name that well. God help me if that thing ever shows up in my house. You will know because you will hear the screaming. I had to fish the dead one out of the pool, where it had probably boiled to death.

To escape the bugs and the heat, Quinn and I drove to San Diego last week. He spent the last half hour of the drive yelling, "SAAAY YAYO!" ("San Diego"), and he's asked to go back about four dozen times since we've been home.

We stayed with good friends who have two little girls and live ten minutes from the beach. Quinn loved that the water chased him. And the lifeguards in La Jolla were taking paraplegic kids out in the waves, to experience the water in ways they're not able to do on their own. The wheelchairs they used on the sand had large rubber wheels; Quinn was transfixed by what he called "water tractors." I explained what a nice thing the lifeguards were doing and told Quinn they were heroes.

We went to the San Diego County Fair, too, where Quinn had his first funnel cake and rode on every ride that would let him. At 34 inches, he didn't quite meet the height requirements for the Oh Chute potato-sack slide, which he really wanted to ride. Maybe next year.

We even got a babysitter, and I did my first training walk for the Avon Walk I'm doing in San Francisco in September. My body was like, "Really? You're doing THIS again? Really??" Just watch me, I responded (and yes, now I'm talking to myself--another consequence of Chris being in Africa). I might even go back to San Diego for another training walk, because walking a half dozen miles in 72 degrees with a light ocean breeze beats walking to the mailbox when it's 117 out any day.

Quinn and I slept in until 8:15 on Sunday morning. We spent time outside without feeling like we'd stepped into an oven. We even got a little time to catch up with some cousins we don't see often enough.

When that giant water bug walks into my house and I have a heart attack, I hope heaven looks just like San Diego.