I'm doing my best to put everything into something resembling chronological order, with some shuffling to make the storylines read better. Click on the family name to get to the family-only summaries.

This week, I was trying to finally grow all kids up to child level. I'm nearly there: all the currently existing offspring are there, but I do plan for 3 more children for this particular generation. I'll probably get that done later today. I also realized that I have 37 kids in this generation, which is *WAY* too much. So there'll be quite a few who'll not get married, and I'm going to keep family sizes smaller, otherwise, it'll be impossible to keep track of everyone. I already have some plans on what to do with the surplus of females...

Families I've not played this week are: CheaterTrash, Fortune, Alien, Nordic.

The Everyman family:

Last time we was them, Billy had turned into an elder and was ecstatically happy to finally have a son. Sally, his 2nd wife, was falling into a deep depression over not being able to go to work and earn money, and even started begging random people who were passing the house for money.

In an attempt to make her happy, Billy gave in to her want for a swimming pool. Little did he know that she planned to use it to kill herself:



It might be ironic that a couple of days later, he himself drowned in the pool. After that, I moved his parents (William and Maria Rose) back into the house, and while William had high body points and could keep himself afloat for quite some time, eventually he, too, fell prey to the pool of evil.



Maria Rose went completely insane over it, and even turned to religion in the form of Jebediah (see next family).

In the middle of this, Will grew to to child-level.

Most of my time this week was spent on a new family: the Breeders.

The name will give you an idea of what I planned when I started them: I wanted to have one family that gets 10 kids. And boy, was that a lot of work. I don't think I'll ever do this again, but now at least I can say that I've done it, and without using the aging cheat, either.

Here they are:



The elders are Jonah and Adelene, both respectable family sims of traditional values. Their daughter is Abigail - who unfortunately for her is a romance sim. Their parents decided to nip her romantic tendencies in the bud and married her off to a respectable religious man, Jebediah, another family sim.

As you can imagine, this setup will mean that Abigail isn't going to be a very happy sim.

Behind the scenes, I made both Abigail and Jebediah as Gemini, hoping to raise their chances of twins. This seems to have helped, out of the 6 pregnancies they had together, 2 were twins (that was before the "eating cookies" theory came up, and from what I remember, Abigail never had cookies).

Here's their house:




Here's some pictures of Jebediah lecturing and praying at other sims (even over the computer!). He's rising fast on the political career track.
(I can understand why Maxis didn't implement religion in their game, but I do hope there'll be custom religious content - of many different religions - once object-making is possible. I'm not religious, but I want some of my sims to be).



Abigail had her first nervous breakdown early during her 2nd pregnancy, which doesn't bode well for her.



Soon afterwards, she started dreaming of romance, and even practicing on her mop!



One day, she saw K'nat walking by their house, and since her parents were looking after her kids, and her husband was at work, she quickly snuck out and started a conversation, which soon turned to flirting:



Those few minutes were going to fuel her imagination for quite some time:



Jebediah kept her pregnant all the time, as soon as she had one kid, he immediately took her to bed to make more. And Abigail was incredibly fertile, she always got pregnant on the first try.



After they had their first four kids (Ruth, Judith and twins Rachael and Rebekkah), I moved Jonah & Adelene out with the kids to make space for more.

Immediately after they moved out, Abigail starting using the time her husband was at work to call K'nat, and eventually to invite him over. Finally she could use all the moves she'd been practicing on her mop:



After the birth of child #5 (finally their first son: Tobias), Abigail knew she wanted more. First, she bribed the Nanny:



and then invited K'nat into her bedroom (I didn't take pics of the woohoo, but it certainly happened):



(After this, the nanny *hated* her, and kept insulting her whenever they met. *g*)

After K'nat left, Jebediah came home and had sex with her, because he was working hard on that "have 10 kids" want of his.



Abigail kept up her affair with K'nat all during her next pregnancy. It was pretty much the happiest she'd even been, she spent most of the time in platinum mood. K'nat really seemed to enjoy seeing her waddle around...



It all came crashing down when she had child #6, and it turned out to have rather alien eyes...

Jebediah was horrified - he suspected that the kid was demon-possessed. He decided that he'd have to do his best to beat the evil out of this child (a girl, named Jezebel).



during her toddlerhood, it even looked as if Jezebel might be growing horns!



The stress of all of this really got to Abigail, who spent most of her time afterwards gibbering in a corner (having three more kids - twins Esther and Ezekiel, and Nathaniel - didn't help either)



Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore and invited K'nat over. After the enthusiastic greeting, they went to the bedroom for desperate nookie:



Unfortunately, Abigail has forgotten that Jebediah had just gotten promoted the day before, and now came home from work at 2pm, instead of 3pm:



Jebediah was shocked, and went nuts, first screaming at Abigail, and then attacking K'nat (who turned out to be a pussy):

After kicking K'nat's ass, Jebediah kicked Abigail out of his life:



Let's do a round-up of the kids still in the house at that time:

Tobias, who as the first-born son knew that Jebediah was going to be putty in his hands, and who is giving off serial-killer-ish vibes, *and* who's had a trauma over finding his mother in bed with a blue-skinned alien:



Ezekiel and Esther, who're both incredibly nice kids:



Nathaniel, who's a very *strange* (and evil-looking) kid. He's also a bed-wetter (which I think is also on the list of 'signs your kid might be a serial killer'):



And of course Jezebel (born after Tobias), who noone left in the house liked at all - if they interacted with her at all, it was only to be mean to her.

After kicking out Abigail, Jebediah invited over his secretary, Sky Prayer. She was a single religious sim that I created very early on but never had a use for before. Since she was also on the politics career track - but only on intern level -, he'd brought her home before and they'd been good friends (tho I think Sky Prayer had a crush on him for the longest time).



He cried out his heart to her, and then asked her to move in, because someone needed to look after all his kids. She was thrilled to accept.



The next day, Jebediah brought Melihet home from work, and she and Jezebel started talking. Since Melihet's brother-in-law is married to K'nat's twin sister, she was able to tell Jezebel that no, she wasn't demon-spawn, she was simply a quarter-alien girl.



After this, Jezebel ran off and joined her mother (read: I used SimPE and moved her from her old house to her mother's new house), and eventually grew into a very introverted and serious, but healthy teen:



This also meant that there are now 2 more free slots in the Breeder family, for the last 2 kids that Jebediah needs for his '10 kids' want. After only 2 days of sleeping in the spare room, Sky Prayer was happy to find herself first courted by and then married to Jebediah:



Sky Prayer is already pregnant, but I've not played them since, because *damn*, that was hard work, dealing with all the kids, especially since I kept switching to the grandparents and the first 4 girls, which is where we'll go next...

The OldBreeders:

Jonah and Adelene took the 4 eldest girls off to a nice small house:




I apparently didn't take pictures of Ruth and Judith as toddlers, but here are Rachael and Rebekkah (the blonde):



Here are they all as kids: Judith, Rachael, Rebekkah, Ruth:



Rebekkah and Rachael turned out to be rather playful (and Rebekkah is also a very outgoing and mean):



Ruth and Judith are both a lot nicer, and more serious, but I don't have child pictures of them.

When Ruth grew into a teenager, she spontaneously started showing an interest in politics and environment (I had that magazine at home because I wanted all of them to have interests in culture). Since she's the oldest, and also played a lot of chess with her grandfather, I decided to scrap my plans to have all 4 of them remain spinsters, and will now move her out once she's an adult, and have her embark on a small political career.



Judith also grew up nicely. She's been showing a lot of interest in painting.



Once they're all grown up and Ruth has moved out, I plan giving them a weekly allowance (one 'kaching'), and any further income will come from Judith's paintings. I do have plans for Rachael and Rebekkah, but I'm going to keep them to myself for now.

Raising 4 kids turned out to be very stressful, and Adelene's heart started making trouble:



I managed to catch 'death of old age' in pictures for the first time:



After Adelene's death, Jonah seems to have developed heart troubles as well:



(they just had the flu. But I thought the pictures could be interpret more liberally. *g*)

I then switched over to the Cheater family, to raise all of their daughters to child level.

The last time we saw them, Donald had just been horrified to find out that his youngest daughter inherited her mother's alien skin. I didn't do anything especially interesting while raising the kids, so here are just pics of them as children (oldest to youngest, left to right):

Daniela is serious, very interested in raising her logic skill, and might follow her father into politics one day. Evelynn is very outgoing and charismatic. Felicitas seems to be the athletic type, whereas S'nur is shy and nice (it's a pity she didn't turn out blonde with grey eyes, I think that might have gone very nicely with her skin tone).



I've decided to test Inge's 'no social worker' patch from www.simlogical.com - S'nur will not be allowed to go to school. She'll be locked into her room for most of the day, and only be let out at night, and during the morning, to make sure that any of Donald's political friends that he might bring home from work won't see her.

[new graphics card! WHEEEE!! I'm currently thinking of doing seperate pages for family trees, because I *really* like the genetics part of the game, and now I have the high-quality pictures to really trace the various traits kids inherit from their parents]

Over at the Strict house, we left the family the last time with their two daughters at child level, looking like total opposites. Here's better-looking pictures of the whole family:



To my surprise, Charlotte's looks improved drastically once she transitioned into a teenager. If she plucked her eyebrows, got rid of the glasses and got nicer clothes, she would probably be quite good-looking, but she'd already accepted that she'd never look as good as her sister, and decided to instead concentrate on using her brains (she's a knowledge sim)



She also showed quite some talent for medicine when Charles started to teach her on the practice dummy:

I'm going to get her a job in the medical career. She also moved up to the 2nd level apartment, which has been remodelled to be perfect for a knowledge sim, leaving the 1st floor room for Melanie (who'll probably turn into a romance sim):

I made only a quick visit to the Native family, just to get the 2 boys up to teenage level. Manilat is following his father's footstep and became a romance sim, Rissen turned into a family sim.

Then I played a bit with the Normals family: last time we saw them, Janet had just moved back home after breaking up with Billy, bringing her daughter Jane Rose with her. She's working at low levels of the Culinary career, and is still a bit ... fragile, crying at the smallest thing.

Her brother Joseph is trying his best to keep her happy, even if it involves playing childish games. He's nice like that.

Joseph and Beth Rose's son John III, playing with the political podium (burping into it *g*). You can see he's trying to hide his huge ears with a clever hair-cut, but it doesn't quite work:



And here's Josepha and Jane Rose (John III and Josepha are going to a private school, Jane Rose has to keep going to public school):



Snapshots of Joseph, Beth Rose and Jane:



John's ghost is also hanging around. Mostly he seems to be enthusiastic about the new bed (maybe he wants more grandchildren? *g*), however, he's very much _not_ fond of Jane Rose:



Eventually, Jane stopped hating Beth Rose quite so much, and they now get along reasonably well.



John III's already grown into a teenager, with a family aspiration. He's also already got a job in the Law Enforcement career, following his father's footsteps (although he'll probably rise higher than his father, who's probably stuck at the Desk Sargeant level for the rest of his life):

And then we have NormalSon - that's the firstborn boy of the Normals, John II, who got kicked out because he was gay. He's still obsessed with finding out about aliens, but I haven't managed to get him abducted at all (*sigh*).



So I decided to take matters into my own hand, and came up with a little scenario.

One night, after John II fell asleep, he had the strangest dream:



He woke up in a different neighborhood, in a strange house...



Suddenly, an old alien came and started chatting him up...



And later, the alien followed him home and was ... *intimate* with him!



When he woke up next morning, he was so upset that he was sick:



Although possibly that wasn't the *only* reason for his constant throwing up. *g* John II was ecstatic.



He was less ecstatic about the whole 'giving birth' thing:



But, eventually, he had a little girl, Starr.

(I reloaded about 12 times, but she stayed white-skinned. I later read up on TSR and the official site, and apparently the Smith family aliens aren't typical aliens. And yes, I used SimPE to turn John II female, then moved him to Strangetown, had him meet Pollination Technician #9, got him pregnant, used SimPE to turn him back to male, and moved him back to Normalville).

She did end up with an alien face, tho - and boy, I hope she grows into this face a bit more, because right now, she's rather on the ugly side (it's a miracle her glasses can stay on at all!)

WHEW. That's it for this week. The Breeder family, and getting John II his alien kid took up most of my gameplaying time. But I can now cross 'have 10 kids' from my list of things I want to do with a family, and I'm going to consider 'have an alien child' semi-done - at least until the patch comes out and it really does get easier to get abducted then.