Its the kids’ birthday this weekend. We’ve organised everything ourselves for years just to have like 3 kids turn up. This year I said fuck it and booked a play centre, so of course this is when everyone rsvps

My corporate employer subsidized group health insurance plan carrier has refused to pay for IVIG for my son who has an autoimmune disorder clinical diagnosis from his pediatric neurologist.

We are appealing, but the way this commonly goes apparently is that they pay for one round of fourteen, if they pay for any at all, assuming we are able to get the denial reversed.

I am told it is about $4.5k per transfusion procedure, which lasts four hours.

I don’t even know how to keep my son from ripping out the IV, let alone sit still for four hours.

His autoimmune disorder comes with neuropsychiatric behaviors which include extreme aggression, self-injury, and hours of non-stop screaming at the top of his lungs.

My family doesn’t know what to do and everything is falling apart.

It’s getting really close to time for the talk.

No not sex. Capitalism. Why does daddy have to go to work every day? The basic answers are not cutting it anymore.

Why do you need to get money? Why do we need money to get toys? Why can’t we play the games we used to be able to play?[we stopped paying for the playstation version of game pass]

Any tips to keeping it light while not outright lying? Might be too early to say “supervillains may not exist but we have something similar, billionaires”

I had the kids watch The Addams Family over the weekend. My oldest wasn’t super into it at first, “It’s weird!” and “It’s scary!” but then the movie started picking up and it got very wacky and silly, and she absolutly loved it. We watched The Addams Family Values the next day, and she thought that movie was also great. The Addams Family Values is the only Thanksgiving movie in my heart (I honestly don’t know if there are any others really).

In about a week, our K2 is moving to his new daycare. We ran into some parents while trick-or-treating who also go to our current daycare; they told us that they are also switching to this new daycare, which is great! He gets along really well with their kiddo; it’s adorable, so I’m super happy he’s going to have someone he knows there. They’re not starting until the start of the year, though.

Lol K1 asked me today if I was going to go vote tomorrow. I said, “That’s a good question…” and I had to think about it for a second. I then told her, “I’ll tell you this: I think it is good to go out and vote, because you should have a say in who gets to make the rules. Also, sometimes, they put rules right on the ballots (the thing you vote on), and those are very important to vote on, because it gives you the power to make the rules.” We talked a little more about rules, and who gets to decide on the rules. Funny, she was also asking me about “donating” because we have a bunch of old clothes to donate. She didn’t know what “donating” was. So I explained that some families have to make choices between buying food, buying shoes, or paying for their house, and for those people, they usually do not end up buying the shoes. I said that doanting is a way to give those people shoes or clothes for free or at a very very low cost, so they don’t have to choose. Which she understood. I then told her though, “Well, you know, if there are people in the world who don’t have enough money for shoes, then that probably also means there are people with too much money too,” and she told me “Well maybe they can donate more shoes”. I told her, “Thats good thinking; they should do that. But, I’ll tell you this, they usually don’t.” She looked at me and told me “Well that’s not fair.” I laughed, and said that I absolutely agree with her. I told her, if it were up to me, if I made the rules, people wouldn’t have to choose between food and clothes, but also, “I don’t make the rules, do I?” to which she told me, “Nope!”

It was a silly conversation, mostly. I did have to laugh at her snap response to the idea that people with a lot of money wouldn’t use it to buy needy people shoes, though. We don’t talk directly about politics often, but me and my SO don’t avoid talking about politics with each other around the kids. So I’m sure they pick up bits and pieces here and there.

We had a long weekend here and I took the kids up to see their great grandfather. I’m so glad they get a chance to see him and that my grandfather gets to see his great grandkids as well. My grandfather is 98 and still going strong so I hope the kids will actually get to remember him when they’re older. Once my kids grow old they could have living memory of someone born almost 200 years ago, that’s a cool thought. My grandfather is such a nice person, he hasn’t been brainwormed by all the things they try to catch old people with, you can still have a conversation with him and it’s worth doing so. If anyone deserves to be remembered for such a long time it’s him.

We had a great block party on Friday and trick-or-treating on Saturday. Little Beaver is the youngest kid of the block, but she was running around with everyone else trying to keep up. I’m realizing how much the kids bring the neighbors together. We don’t necessarily have much in common except them, but obviously enough that we can enjoy each other’s company for a few hours.

4 year old has been all about Alice Cooper’s “Feed my Frankenstein” after hearing it on a Halloween playlist. It’s too funny, but I’m hoping this doesn’t get us in more trouble with her school