What are we gonna do next?

Here we are comfortably settled into an apartment like hotel arrangement with a kitchen and two bedrooms and a huge pull out couch and a hoard of children who can't stop whining and crying. I'm not very good at letting children know what's coming in the future. In fact, as a general rule, I try to give as little information as possible about the future because, not myself being God, if I say that something is going to happen, and then am unable to carry through, pandemonium breaks out. So, and I've mentioned this before, I never say that we're going to the library until about 30 seconds before, and then I just shout for everyone to put on their shoes. And, since the library is only a minute and a half away, I only have a minute and a half of questions to deal with about where we're going and what we're going to do when we get there. I know this is the opposite of common parenting sense, or rather, the agreed upon cultural norm that you read about in Parenting Magazine. Children like to know what's coming, I've read so many times. Give them a ten minute heads up when you're about to change activities so that they have time to prepare themselves. Yeah, mmhmm. Whenever I give a ten minute warning the kid is still splayed out on the floor sobbing with grief because guess what, kids don't like change.

And I suppose I don't really either, except that I do, kind of. The thing that I most want is for God to show me what's going to happen next. I want to know the future. I want him to say, first you're going to do this and this and then move here and do this. And you're going to live here and you're going to be perfectly happy and nothing bad will ever happen to you. And so far, to my great disappointment, he's never said that, about anything. You just go along and stuff happens, sometimes with a ten minute warning but more often not.

God, of course, knows what's going to happen and doesn't not tell me in case it doesn't work out. He doesn't not tell me because I would react in exactly the same manner that all my children do. I would launch a volley of irritating and impossible questions. How long are we gonna stay? Why do we have to do that? Actually, I don't wanna go do that, I wanna do this. Am I gonna have a good time? I'm prolly not gonna have a good time. And so on and so forth. Giving information to a child about the future doesn't diminish the child's anxiety in anyway that I can see, it just gives more time to consider whether the future will be a place of happiness, and to discover that the present is not turning out as well as you'd hoped either.

On the other hand, I did know this lovely little arrangement was in our future, and I looked forward to it pretty happily, and now that I'm here I'm hoping the days will slow way way down so that I can not have to think about the ones that come after. The best thing of all is that Matt just took all the children and their crying across to the free breakfast and so I am here in almost total silence. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. It doesn't really matter, because sufficient for today is its own crying.