A Dream So Big by Steve Peifer

Author:Steve Peifer [Peifer, Steve; Lewis, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780310587156
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

Daddies, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Love Country

EVERY TERM BREAK WE’D BEEN AT RVA, WE PLANNED SOME SORT OF FAMily adventure. Not only for a change in scenery but also for a break from the joyful 24/7 demands of dorm-parenting, and a respite from our other campus responsibilities. We’d made an effort to expose our sons and ourselves to the amazing beauty and breadth of Africa, its diverse cultures, and some of the wonderful people God is using to do so many good things there.

However, ten-day off-road camping trips among the nomadic desert peoples of northern Kenya, hiking up dormant volcanoes, even daylong safaris through any of the national game parks no longer seemed like practical Peifer family vacations with nine-month-old babies. And the entire Peifer clan needed a vacation. With all that we’d done that term, plus the excitement and challenge of adopting, parenting, and adapting to twins, we were all on the verge of exhaustion. Even our older boys.

Spending a week resting on the beach seemed a wonderful and manageable alternative adventure for a family with two new babies. The eight-hour drive over some of the worst roads you can imagine to get to the coast was another matter. For some unexplained reason, friends who had gladly offered us rides before were hesitant about driving cross-country with two nine-month-olds in the car. (One guy even asked, “Are you taking both of them?”) We finally decided we would rent a car, but then discovered that it would be cheaper to fly with a special deal Kenya Airways had running at the time. So instead of an eight-hour drive, we enjoyed a one-hour flight.

Beach-bumming for a week was the perfect vacation for our family that year. It was surprisingly restful and rejuvenating. Two totally unrelated highlights of that trip I will remember till I die:

Lifetime Memory 1: You don’t have any idea how much sand you have on you if your skin is white. Ben and Katie looked like they were sugarcoated. They loved the sand and they loved the water; they just weren’t wild about cleaning off the sand.

Lifetime Memory 2: The older boys and I went snorkeling one day. We arranged for a local fisherman to take us to the coral reef on a wooden sailboat he told me had cost him (or maybe his grandfather) two hundred dollars new. We had to wade out a fair distance to where the boat was anchored; one of the crew carried Matthew when the water got to be over his head. Just before we reached the boat, I stepped on a sea urchin—a spiky little critter that seemed perfectly and painfully designed for the sole (no pun intended) purpose of making a foot bleed.

We had already waded all the way out and boarded the boat before our cheerful Kenyan captain confessed he didn’t have any snorkeling equipment on board, but he was certain he could locate some. So we sailed for ten minutes and he found friends who would lend us their masks.

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