All of Sylvia and Abraham's children are now in school, and toddler stuff was set aside. No more potty training, highchairs or tower building in a while.
The extra time allows for Sylvia to get more involved with the garden. There are many plants she would like to add, although she is mainly growing the base species.
She lacks onions, potato and herbs. It's a pity children can't do any gardening, would be nice for them to build their responsibility from say at least helping with watering.
Now that Abraham decided to max out Painting instead of Fitness, in order to make life easier for his descendants, also he has more free time on his hands. Helping the kids with their homework. Some days they all get seated right after school, and the kids have mostly good grades.
Tonight it was expected that twins Rudolph and Sammy would become teenagers. Sylvia is bored with baking those cakes, so she suggested pizza delivery instead. I think it was my first TS4 pizza ever, because it surprised me that I could not order multiple pizzas, and then that the delivery girl joined the party, used their bathroom, and had to be told to leave even though she had already been tipped.
Well, the twins did not grow up during the night (back in some previous game, sims aged up at 6 PM if they did not use the cake already), and pizza remainders was packed for sack lunch.
During the night the twins DID become teens. I always enter CAS to adjust traits because in all my games the children's traits and genetics will be affected by their parents, and in CAS I can easily get the overview I need to get it all right. All children basically get minimum 1 trait from each parent, boys first choose one of mom's traits, and girls first choose one of dad's traits. Regarding teeth, boys get mom's and girls get dad's. Hair growth, freckles, beauty spots and need of glasses depend on my own DNA system. I like these details to be randomly passed on as well. I'll make sure to focus more on DNA in a future report.
Rudolph scored pretty well in Social (6) and Creativity (4) as a child, so he chose the Friend of the world aspiration. Trait wise Rudolph got Sylvia's Geek trait. I think Rudolph might be into gaming, not sure yet. He seems a little sad at times, guess I should find out why.
Sammy scored pretty well in Creativity (6) and Social (5) as a child, and he picked the Musical Genius aspiration. Trait wise, he got Sylvia's trait Neat (because Geek was already taken by Rudolph). Sammy got his aspiration because he seems to be interested in music, you know that feeling you have for no good reason.
All four kids have the Cheerful trait already, that's a bummer because when starting this challenge I was thinking more along the TS3 lines where traits are sometimes handled by the game. In TS4 it seems I can always decide traits, so therefore the Cheerful trait will no longer be a rule. It will be more interesting when the household members have various traits, and I can still give Cheerful to the final gen 3 sim, just to meet that silly challenge requirement...
Parenthood GP also introduces the five Character Values that are Manners, Emotional Control, Responsibility, Empathy and Conflict Resolution. Both Rudolph and Sammy are Responsible, but I have not payed much attention to what affects this. Parents praising or scolding is obvious, but doing extra homework or general tasks at home seems to make a difference, too. And probably a lot more. The character values system is probably used for deciding the toddler/child/teen behavior only, and will go away once becoming a young adult.
They got a note about the Spice Festival in San Myshuno, and mostly because Sylvia wants to go looking for new plants and spices, they all set off to explore this exotic event. And they ran into Ms. Dorothy Flemming, as well, the photographer.
They mostly roamed around on random. Sammy enjoyed the guitar performance, Abraham looked a little bored. I guess he was pleased though that the weird Ms Flemming did not sit by their table. Fiona and Donna were more interested in playing basketball than hanging around the food stands.
Sylvia bought the festival t-shirt for herself and all the swags on offer, and then headed over to the area with various plants to be harvested and free food servings. She harvested a few plants and ate as much as she could to reveal the recipes, but you probably must buy the food from the stands to learn the recipe.
Sylvia recently bought a camera in order to take some simple family photos, both for their walls and to send with kids who move out. I think this snap was cool, with the random bulb playing the role as a romantic full moon :)
Visiting a festival with a large household was fun! They didn't return back home until late hours - Donna and Fiona were all in the red. They will definitely go to more festivals, but not necessarily the full family.
Next day Abraham started quietly, after all they were very tired, but suddenly he ran over to the playground to clean up some mess there. I never saw them run off their home lot to clean, so this surprised me. The foreign kids make more mess as Abraham cleans, I had to send him back home :)
And finally - the Clump family got their first TV! The livingroom was reorganized, as the house got a foundation a large terrace was added outside with access from livingroom. Now they are broke again, perhaps the teen boys should start working after school?
Here's the house seen from main entrance. It's a tad blocky, but I think they should add one more floor before working on the aesthetics.
And here's the garden side, facing the waters. The terrace fence needs some paint (wouldn't that be a superb chore for teenagers?), and the garden path should lead all down to the garden gate, but due to fine tuning of other content this is not done yet. Lots of garden plants are desired, too. The idea is to let future generations develop both the house and garden. You see the 5 prepared units on the left. Abraham and Sylvia will focus on their units in the next report coming up in just 2 days :)
To be continued...
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