It's complete and utter nonsense that, to some degree, differences in financial situations are based on choices? People's choices in life have zero affect on their long term finances? No one made a personal attack on your child. No one said "They're just making bad decisions". You're setting up a strawman here.

No, I mean that this exact situation happened in my extended family. Two families, same numbers of kids at the same ages, living in the same area, both single income, had similar incomes, family A dad had two years on family B dad career establishment, family B literally chose to live more frugally to get into a house and family A chose to eat out all the time, rent a much larger home, go on vacations. Which is truly fine. There is nothing wrong with having different priorities in life. They see it as enjoying their time now while their kids are still young and building memories, so taking their crew for interesting outings+eating out every weekend and going on a couple of family vacations per year is their priority right now, not making choices to try to ease their financial situation long term. I don't see a problem with that, but when they bemoan the impossible, unavoidable rising costs of living and how it's just not possible for a family to get ahead, get into their own home--I sympathize that rising costs stink and I'm not going to say anything else unless my opinion is directly asked for, but I'm not going to agree that it's just the inevitable forces of economics causing disparities here.

While I do agree no one should be looking down their noses at others, to some degree, those differences are based on choices. Not always. But the reason one family has a low-interest mortgage while another has ever-increasing rent might be because the first chose to forgo vacations, eating out, and renting a nicer, more spacious home while saving to get into a house (the situation of two branches of my family). The reason one family might have daycare costs for one and another has them for three is a choice. The reason another family has six kids and no childcare costs is because they chose when young to plan ahead and lived frugally with one spouse working to put the other through a higher degree before beginning to have children so that they could have a career that could support a family on one income. While many things outside our control do happen that affect our financial situations, many others are within our control.

When I was in middle school, I was walking up the steep hill from the bus stop to my home alone one afternoon. A car drove up the hill from behind me and slowed. I saw the man driving it turn his head to look at me as he drove on slowly past and then sped up before disappearing around the curve ahead of me. As soon as the car was out of sight, I heard a voice quite near me say “run” in an urgent tone. I began to run as fast as I could up the steep hill towards home with my heavy backpack. I had passed maybe 15 houses when the same voice said “hide”, and I jumped over some bushes forming a low hedge in a front yard and lay down behind them, looking out underneath them near the ground. A moment later the same car came driving slowly up the hill from behind me again, with the man’s head turning and looking from side to side. He must have looped through the neighborhood and back around. Once the car had again passed me up the hill, I heard the voice say “run” again, and I ran the rest of the way home.

I don't know what to use once a persistent stain is there, but I have noticed that we no longer get deodorant stains on our shirts at all since I started using homemade laundry detergent. My homemade detergent is made of borax, super washing soda, and Fels-Naptha laundry soap bars; I don't know which of those made the difference.

My mom has come to help me for a few weeks with every baby. (With #4, she had an important international trip for a sibling planned when ds was born 3 weeks early, and my grandma came to help for the first few weeks. My mom came when she got back, so I had help for rather longer with #4 than the others—which was really great, as he was the most difficult baby to care for with health problems.) She is wonderful, ready to jump in and do anything including baby care, but never trying to do the thing that some relatives do of “I’ll hold the baby so you can get things done around here”. She cleans the house, gets the kids to their activities, helps with their homeschooling except in the most teacher-prep intensive subjects, generally shows the siblings a great time, leaves a Costco-sized stock of disposable dishes and my freezer stocked with read-to-go meals for when the dinners from the church ladies stop coming, and is always delighted to hold the baby at any time of the night or day while I take a shower or get some rest. With baby #5, she also came before when I was placed on semi bed rest and took ds#4 to his medical appointments with written lists of questions from me, zoomed me in the doctors’ offices, and brought back detailed written answers to my questions. My dh has never been able to take off more than a week and a half at a birth before. He does a ton when he is home, but I mostly want him with me when I am still in the hospital, and then not long after we come home he is having to be gone all day, so having my mom come is a wonderful help.

This is very interesting to me. My kids are not near this stage yet, but we are expecting and there is going to be a fifteen year difference in ages between our oldest and youngest children, which makes things more complicated in trying to be fair across siblings. I don’t feel that the dollar amounts given to each child always need to be exactly the same, but I don’t want one child to lack opportunities that another has been given by us, or one child to get greater support from us because they chose more expensive options. My current plan is to offer the amount of college tuition at my and dh’s alma mater to each kid for their higher education at the time they need it (towards whatever school or other education/career advancement path they choose), so that the dollar amounts won’t be the same between my oldest and youngest kids, but it will hopefully be equitable contributions and not vary based on kids’ school choices. I’m not sure how to apply a similar adjustment to weddings. We currently have accounts that we are trying to save up $X per kid in, part to be able to offer towards helping them afford to serve a religious mission if they so choose and part to them at marriage, either for wedding expenses or to help them starting out. I like the idea of these totaling up the same, as boys’ missions in our church cost more as they are longer and girls’ family wedding contributions are traditionally more. But weddings will likely cost more to put on fifteen years later, so that an equal contribution will effectively be less help. And do you choose an age at which to just gift that wedding money anyway, rather than have a child who doesn’t marry never be offered that help? I don’t feel the same way about giving the mission money if they choose not to serve, or giving the college money if they don’t choose further education of some kind. I want to make those worthwhile opportunities in life more easily attainable for my kids should they choose to pursue them, just as I will facilitate each kid participating in one fine art and one athletic extracurricular if they so choose, but I feel no need to give the kid who chooses to only do one or neither of those growing up a check to even up money spent. Marriage is different, though, as options and opportunities are going to be so different for different people.

Yeah, last summer on a family road trip one jumped out in front of us and totaled the car.

One thing on the horizon is going to be (semi) paternity leave for dh when the baby comes in March. I'm not really sure how much of leave it will actually turn out to be. Since our last baby, the state has passed a law to add a new tax giving paid maternity/paternity leave for three months. While dh is entitled to this and his firm will be reimbursed from the new tax for his salary for time that he takes off, his government contracts still have to be fulfilled, and there is no one at his small firm able to take over all of his responsibilities. (He has been training an associate who will be able to pick up a good chunk of the work, but not the more difficult cases.) It will be nice even if he is only on half time or so. We've never been able to have more than a week or two of him off when I've had a baby before. It won't initially make a difference towards income, but may increase the business profits for the year.

1997, California Breakfast--a low-sugar whole grain cereal with skim milk, maybe a banana Lunch--paper bag lunch for school with peanut butter & jelly sandwich on whole wheat, carrot sticks, an apple or orange, maybe a granola bar or cookie. water from the drinking fountain Dinner--dijon chicken, wheat bread to dip in the sauce, romaine salad. dessert on Sunday night only

I set up my excel budget for the year, making necessary adjustments. Comparing to my original budgets from the last couple years, it is clear why staying in the budget seems to take so much more effort than it used to. Almost everything has crept up in price to one degree or another. Dh's salary has stayed the same over that time, though profit distributions from his share of the practice have grown. I try to make all of our expenses fit within the monthly salary, both for practical reasons because we never know when or how much a profit distribution is going to be, and to be able to put the distributions towards retirement and college savings, but I'm not sure how much longer I will be able to manage that. One great thing, we just paid off the car we bought this past summer (to replace the one the elk totalled).

My doctor told me that for a bp reading to be accurate, I need to sit for 10 minutes before taking it. She isn't concerned at all about higher readings that are taken without this period first, only if they are elevated after resting.

I am so grateful that this past two weeks with everyone so sick, it has just been normal terribly sick kids stuff--no dealing with the kid on chemo has a fever, and even though it is almost certainly the same thing as his siblings, we need him to spend the day in the ER running tests and test his blood counts over and over again in case it knocks his immune system too low and maybe iv antibiotics and we need to pull him off the treatment that is keeping his cancer in check. That was over two years on chemo whenever someone brought a bug home.

I have always had bp problems with pregnancy, but after my last pregnancy, for the first time, it didn't go back to normal on its own. It was super frustrating to search for suggestions to improve my bp with lifestyle changes and find things that I mostly already exceeded--I have never drunk alcohol or caffeine, already had fruits and vegetables several times a day, rarely had junk food, already exercised around 4-5 days per week, had already lost 15 pounds beyond the net weight loss I had from an extremely difficult pregnancy. With much searching, I did eventually find some suggestions that I could implement, and was able to successfully bring my bp down without medication. intense, sustained exercise at least 3 times a week-instead of doing a 5 mile walk or a 20 minute jog on most weekdays, I went for 45+ minute runs every other day after finding a study about the greater benefits of intense, sustained exercise for bp magnesium supplements potassium-ate a banana each day dark chocolate-a little square of very dark chocolate each day leafy greens-not just having vegetables several times a day, but having 3-4 servings of leafy greens each day

These kids certainly treated it like a unique challenge that made them different, that no one understood what they were going through, oh how would their families react, the world is just designed to be set up against people like them, etc. Until it became old hat and they switched to a new "problem" that they perceive as something that makes them have a uniquely difficult life.

I can't comment on young adults, but the victim mentality among teens in our area is something my dd has brought up a number of times about girls at her high school. Not in those words, but she is frustrated that "the thing" for many of her peers is to have problems/issues/unique challenges and complain about them endlessly. She says that they will cycle through different problems and issues, and a new problem will be trendy every few months. At one point it was transgenderism, and many of the girls decided they were transgender, but several months later they had all changed their minds and the trending issue was depression. Then it was homosexuality, then asexuality, then anxiety. Each of these fads have gone through her peer group in the last year and a half. None of them included actual diagnoses. And girls who don't participate in the complaining about the current trending issue have been mocked for being "so perfect" and for having "such an easy life".

My dh is a wonderful husband, but gift-giving is not his forte. For a long time he had the mindset that a gift had to be something you unwrapped on the day, not too practical, and a surprise. For the first ten years or so he kept trying to give me jewelry, though other than my wedding ring I hardly ever wear any jewelry. Or if I told him about some specific things I wanted there’s a good chance I’d get something roughly along the lines of one of those, but different. I’m not very into stuff in general. It wasn’t a big deal. I appreciated his effort. I didn’t look forward to gifts, but it was a minor thing compared to the daily work and commitment involved in a loving relationship. But after 16 years, things changed. I love that dh has let go of those ideas about gift giving the last few years. We agreed to give each other cash donations to a trip fund for birthday and Christmases for a couple years, then went on an amazing trip together this last spring. For my Christmas gift from him this year, I picked out the exact chicks I want from the hatchery to add some interesting genetics to my backyard flock. They will come next June. It’s still a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it’s so fun.

Our estate is not significant. The equity in the house, dh’s 10% stake in his small firm, partially funded retirement accounts, some minor savings, a small pension from a prior job, life insurance. All in all, I think it comes to enough to provide for the kids while they’re young and give them modest help with higher education, if it weren’t for the wildcard of medical care. The full billed amounts from ds’s first month after diagnosis came to significantly more than the cost of our home. We didn’t have to pay most of that, but I know there’s potential for medical costs to wipe out a lot of funds if you don’t either have very good private insurance or qualify for assistance. If our estate goes to pay our end of life costs, it probably means that our children are already grown before we die, and most of my concerns are alleviated.

It looks like my kids would not qualify for MediCal, as they consider the income of all adults living in the same household, so they would be disqualified based on bil’s income. Ds is likely to survive. I inquired in an online group I’m in for parents of kids with his type of cancer what they have done, and several said they held some money in a trust until their kid with cancer reached about 30. The trust could be accessed by any of their kids for medical needs, including the things that insurance doesn’t cover like medical travel and second opinions. I also looked at the criteria for disability qualification. With the progress he has made over the last few years, ds would not qualify now. It is possible that the cancer may cause more damage to his nervous system that could qualify him later, but close monitoring and timely treatment will hopefully prevent that possibility. Meaning that he would not qualify for SSDI or the health coverage that comes with it as a young adult. My kids would get SS survivor benefits until they graduate from high school, but it wouldn’t be a lot per kid, since the maximum total family benefit is 180% of the parent’s basic payment, and they divide that equally among all the children.

My son may qualify, but I don’t know. He has some permanent nerve damage to his spine from the tumor and the surgery that causes mobility issues, but he has regained a lot over years of physical therapy. I inquired about it once and was told he should check if he will qualify when he turns 18.

I neglected to mention that my dh is an attorney who has done a number of wills for clients before. But he has never dealt with a situation with minor heirs with uneven needs likely to last into adulthood, and he hasn’t done any trusts. My dad is a world class estate attorney who is not a member of our state bar. So part of this planning phase is figuring out whether what we want will be something that dh can do for us, possibly with some advice from my dad, or whether we are going to want something that will require hiring another attorney.

Dh and I are planning on doing a will or maybe a trust, and I am considering what we should put into it about medical care. We are having baby #6 in March. Ds9’s cancer will need medical monitoring forever, and he will probably need repeated bouts of intensive cancer treatments with breaks in between into early adulthood. His type of cancer generally becomes much less aggressive around the mid- to late-twenties, so if he makes it to around 29 or 30 (which he probably will) his medical needs should lighten up significantly then. My sister and bil and my parents are both great options for caring for our kids if something were to happen to us, and they live very close together. We are thinking probably because of age we would have the kids go to my sister and bil, with my parents’ help, if something were to happen to us. My parents are totally still physically capable now, and sis and bil’s kids are mostly older than ours but they do still have three kids at home, so it could be a very full house, but chances are good that they will not still be so physically capable for another 18 years. The general plan is that all life insurance and assets would go towards first, providing for the kids, second, their educations, and third, (if anything is left at that point) divided equally among them. But I am wondering what provisions we need to make for medical concerns, and how to judge whether what we would be leaving is enough to provide for them. Of course we want to help with the kids’ higher education costs, but if there is a possibility of funds running out before expensive medical needs are met, we need to not have it structured to be distributing the last of the funds for education purposes because they occurred first. But it is so hard to judge how much might be needed for medical care. We have double insurance for ds9, both private and state, and it has done well at mostly covering his medical care. I have some concerns about when he ages out of being allowed on a parent/guardian’s insurance at age 26, maybe just coming out of school or maybe not done yet, and maybe still in the midst of this long fight against cancer. My sister and bil’s family have very high deductible insurance through his work that they basically never use because they never meet the deductible. If they were our kids’ guardians and our kids’ qualification for state insurance were based on their income, ds would not qualify. Unless CA has an exemption from income requirements for diagnosis that would allow him to have it, or if the qualifications are different for kids you become the guardian of than kids you are the parent of. I need to learn how this works. My parents’ insurance might be better, so making them the guardians might be better in that way right now, but they will hopefully retire before too much longer. What special considerations would you make? I’m thinking maybe we should delay distributing the remainder after education costs to the kids until ds is older, beyond the window of when his cancer is likely to cause problems, so it would be there for medical needs first. And setting specific limits on the amount to be distributed for education costs per kid, so that expensive college choices can’t drain the funds while expensive medical needs are still a likelihood—with the thought being that if they have to get student loans they could then pay the remainder of the funds towards them when those are distributed after ds reaches 30, if there is any remainder. That would put my oldest into her mid-thirties before it was finally distributed. Which might really suck, if the older kids have to pay student loans for 10 or 15 years and the younger don’t. Not that I am sure that there will be a remainder. We don’t have a ton of assets, raising and educating six kids is expensive, and raising a kid with cancer is more expensive. I hope that with the life insurance it would be enough that it wouldn’t be a financial burden on the guardians, but it’s just such a shot in the dark trying to guess how much would be needed. My parents would absolutely help in every way, financial and childcare and medical appointments. My husband’s parents intend to give him an inheritance someday that would go to our kids if something happened to him. I don’t think they would help with the regular needs of our kids growing up, but the kids could later pay off student loans and medical bills with that inheritance money if what we left for them didn’t go far enough. Any thoughts on how to best structure this? ETA: I don’t know why it added the lines. I don’t seem to be able to delete them.

Hamas claimed that they weren’t holding any more non-military female hostages when the pause was ending. At the time, a spokesman from the U.S. state department said they believe that Hamas was retaining certain female hostages because they don’t want those women able to testify to the treatment they have received. All of the minor hostages have been released except for the little Bibas boys, who Hamas says are dead but have declined to offer any evidence of.

The three men who were killed by the IDF were all civilians captured from their homes on the kibbutzim. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67732353 Doron Steinbrenner (30), Daniela Gilboa (19), Agam Berger (19), Judith Hagai (70), Noa Argamani (25), Eden Yarushalmi (24), Inbar Heiman (21), Romi Gonen (23), Amit Buskila (28), and Carmel Gat (39) are all female civilian hostages who have not been released yet. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67053011

Perhaps “during a time with no declared state of war” would be precise.