Dang. I’m the Uncle who specifically looks for the noisy toys. And glitter - anything with glitter.

She gets stuff they’ll let her keep, too, but my obligations as an older brother come before those as an uncle.

I’m an uncle who gets to see my nieces and nephews rarely. I just got back from a trip where we were clearing out grandma’s house; she’s a hoarder and kept a bunch of her daughter’s toys, so 3-yo grand-daughter had a sudden cornucopia of age-appropriate new (to her) toys to play with.

One day she ended up in my wife’s and my room, helping us pack for the return trip. She latched on to a small empty travel pill bottle and started zooming around the bed with it like it was a car (although, sometimes it flew). The bottle looked nothing like anything; just a random short cylinder of plastic, but she amused herself for at least a half hour with it.

Boundless energy; boundless imagination. We’re quite amazing creatures.

Insurance companies in the US often exhibit paradoxical behavior based entirely on statistics and ignoring individual case details.

Often a less expensive procedure will be denied until after a more expensive procedure is performed, guaranteeing that insurance has to pay for both, just because some significant percent of patients need the more expensive procedure either way.

Health insurance is utterly stupid, and mainly because it’s a for-profit, private enterprise in the US. Data goes in and a decision comes out, and the insurance companies really only care as long as the algorithm results in a net profit over time. Good outcomes for patients isn’t even a consideration.