#haven't played sims in a good while after losing some really good ones when my bf's computer broke

[kitsunefloof]

@dynamite124 This has been a wip for a while but I finally managed to finish my Taliesin sim! I'm really happy with how he turned out, he's so handsome 😭 Thinking of making him a spellcaster and then moving him into the horse world for Naomi (cowboy Taliesin anyone?)

[sweeterthanmydreams]

The Third Summer: Triple Trouble part 1 (the Hemming-Byrd Legacy)

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Summer starts in with Lanuola's baby boot camp: she's rotating through the infants doing tummy time to get Amethyst, Merida, and Tourmaline their milestones. Ophelia tries hard to knock out her knitting once and for all while Bea gets her art on and starts working through a pack of crayons; she's not got much childhood yet, but she still has goals to achieve! If you haven't heard much about Ruby, it's because she aged up with terrible needs and has been walking across the lot aimlessly instead of dealing with them. This girl is doing serious laps, getting nowhere... Lanuola takes the babies through their first bubble baths in her homemade tub starting with Tourmaline and ending with Merida. At some point while marathon-drawing, Bea loses a second tooth.

Bea finally gets to play her violin, and Lanuola watches to give her pointers. While they're out practicing, visitors drop by: it's the neighbors to the rescue! The Iosuas drop by with extra food to help the struggling new parents which is greatly needed, since they're a little lacking on both time and leftovers. The next morning, Beatrix wakes up with yet another lose tooth; this girl is going to have an empty mouth sooner rather than later. I'm starting to suspect that the game is forgetting she already lost a tooth before. Beatrix decides to help out by tending the garden; after sleeping like the dead, little Ruby gets up to watch her. Day 2 of baby boot camp begin in earnest: Merida is the first to achieve solo tummy time powers! Ruby sings a jaunty little tune to baby sister Tourmaline and discovers that she's a little singer: she just likes making little musical melodies.

Bea knocks her aspiration out of the park! She's now an Artistic Prodigy and more than ready to move on to the wide world of teenage hood. I'm not ready for her to move on; sorta wish she had three weeks as a child (& three as a teen) instead of the 2:4 split. If this weren't a graded challenge, I'd just skew the aging to be a 3:3 split but I will refrain. The infants continue to conspire to have a nightmare array of traits: between Amethyst peeing on them during feed time, Merida letting it fly during changings, Tourmaline projectile sneezing snot, and Ruby getting her food everywhere Ophelia and Lanuola are eagerly awaiting the days when their little ones are old enough to be responsible for their own messes. There is so much yuck on the floor at all times.

Bea gets some quality mom time with Ophelia when she teaches her to knit; after hanging out for a bit, Ophelia masters her Lady of the Knits aspiration! In order to buckle down on helping with the babies, she's putting of picking a new goal for now. (After popping into Fabulously Wealth for the weekly deposit trait.) Amethyst is the first triplet to learn to sit up! Tourmaline is the next to figure it out and after a good nights sleep, Merida too gets sitting up figured out; she's the last to sit but the first to try a baby food with mom Lanuola. It's papaya and Merida quite likes it.

Lanuola gets a job offer to jump back into the world of business and try her hand at it's second branch: CEO. In the spirit of her midlife crisis, Ophelia takes off for work in the most ridiculous outfit I've ever seen. Bea and Ruby enjoy a beach day together. They decide to immortalize the baby turtle Bea saw in sand as a sculpture. As the sun sets over the sand, Bea celebrates her birthday with a bunch of her friends from her club! Thanks to the delicious tajine Lanuola served, they've also managed to ace the "have six sims sit & eat together" challenge for the Legacy. Bea continues down that green brick road as she ages up and has decided she's really into making things; on top of that, she's hoping to follow in mom Ophelia's footsteps and become a world class painter!

After her friends have gone home, her mom's introduce her to the big present they got her: her own recycling machine! She can't wait to rip the ribbons off and get to deconstructing! Now that she's rolled 2/3 of her traits, this means she has only one more chance to roll Child of the Islands and is thereby unlikely to be our heir. She still has a lot to achieve with Fabrication, so maybe she'll stay on to support the future heir when she grows up.

Tourmaline masters the pincer grasp and gets to try her first baby foods: applesauce & bananas, both of which she likes. Now that she's eating the chair, it's become clear that Tourmaline is ALSO a messy eater; she's been watching Ruby too much! After a glitchy bedtime juggle, all three infants are simultaneously put in their cribs for the night since it's due to rain tomorrow; Marcus Flex decides to step in and read Amethyst to sleep which gives Lanuola a chance to get back to her fitness goals & Ophelia some time to write a style blog.

In the morning, it's Beatrix's first day of high school! Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get rid of the overcast gloom pardon the particularly drab "off to school" shots. Since it's monsoon season anyways I, the player, take a break by making sure both Ophelia and Lanuola go to work leaving me with an empty house for the day; this also makes it Ruby's first day of daycare: she's gotten a surprising amount of "at home" time with her moms. Before Ophelia heads out to work, she helps Ruby work through some flash cards so she can master her final skill: learning to talk. Congratulations on completing all your skills Ruby!

This is the point where the game crashed on me. Thankfully I only lost a little bit of the evening & the morning routine, but I did my best to recreate it from my notes. I'm going to need Growing Together to cut me a break with these weird glitches.

At work, Lanuola discovers something fishy is up with the business' finances. Although the best idea for her career is to keep her head down, she decides it's time to blow the whistle (mostly for the fame boost). She does in fact get her fifteen minutes of fame on the local news and the confidence of doing the right thing, but she ends up home early for the day because she's been fired. That's alright with her, though: she's planning to kick her feet up and relax with the babies while waiting for her connections to roll another Business opportunity her way. Beatrix arrives home from school stressed out from all her hard work but there's good news! Family friend Wiki calls to inform her that she's way out performed expectations: she's ready for early graduation! Beatrix is STOKED; she can't wait to start college! That evening, after putting in for admission and scholarships, Beatrix is initiated into the Hummingbird Collective and joins her first meeting.

Amethyst is a slow learner but she finally gets to try her first baby food with Ophelia: it's yogurt and she loves it. Wiki & Fetia lend a helping hand while Ophelia and Lanuola try to get the triplets through the last of their milestones before their birthday. At this point, they've yet to stand on their own or say their first words so, despite Lanuola's tireless hours in baby boot camp, it's still a rush to get the basics complete. Little peanut butter puff (Merida) gets to try her first finger foods but is unsure about her peanut butter puffs. Amethyst tries her first finger food, too, (yogurt melts) but she was also unsure about them. In comparison to big sister Ruby, the triplets are not all that engaged with food; maybe Beatrix's picky eater phase rubbed off on them. While goofing around with Beatrix, Merida says her first word: "piggy"! Currently the score for "hearing first words" is two for two in Beatrix's favor.

Meanwhile, Lanuola wins the "ultimate milestone blocker" award: thanks to a carried over moodlet from a terminated pregnancy she can't wait to sit down the moment Tourmaline is out of her hands. The only problem is, she was setting Tourmaline down to pull herself up on that very chair... I very nearly burst a blood vessel over that one because it happened a lot. Amethyst says her first word while playing by herself on the play mat: her mom's overheard it while feeding her sisters & they both agree it was "hee hee. Oops.". After several false starts (read: Lanuola sitting in the chair before she could get to it) Merida is the last one to achieve "pull to stand". That just leaves Tourmaline's first word as the only milestone they're still waiting on.

If you've been counting, you'll notice that I'm already out of images in this post. Catch the tail end of the summer featuring the triplet's birthday and Ruby's birthday in the next part!

[rheallsim]

I just wanted to make a little post explaining why I haven't been as active here lately, so here goes!

[Fair warning, there's discussion about chronic health issues (Chronic Fatigue in particular) under the cut.]

So I really, really miss the old gameplay posts I used to make, for the Velasquez Legacy, my LEPacy family, the Globetrotter Challenge, etc. I miss the engagement and I miss the stories and I miss seeing my sims faces pop up on my timeline when their queued post is published.

The issue is I've been struggling for the past few years with worsening chronic fatigue symptoms. Nowadays I sleep on average of 9-12 hours every day and I still wake up just as exhausted as when I went to sleep. Most days I don't end up getting out of bed until 2pm in the afternoon, and it's not for a lack of trying; I'm just a complete useless utter zombie if I try to wake up before my body is ready to.

I started a job at the beginning of this year, a really good one for my circumstances, working from home five hours a day, twice a week. My coworkers were fantastic, my boss was the best boss I've ever had, and they worked so hard to accommodate me and my fatigue issues, but after working there for seven months I realized that my CFS was getting worse, not better. So I had to quit. :(

It was the first real job I'd had since 2010. It was such a wonderful opportunity, and with such great people, and I was heartbroken that I had to leave them. They said they'd do their best to welcome me back if I started to feel better, which was so kind of them! But right now I have no idea when that will be, if ever.

I've had CFS symptoms since well before COVID-19 hit us all, but my doctors didn't get their act together to seriously try and find me a specialist to help until around the time COVID hit. And of course, so many of the CFS resources, of which there were very few to start with, are now taken up by folks suffering with Long Covid, which presents almost exactly like CFS in many cases and have been treated by the same specialists.

I've been trying to find a specialist to take me on for years now, and haven't been able to find anyone. I've taken all sorts of tests to try and figure out what causes my fatigue, and even though we've ruled out a lot of things, we've found nothing that's helped. I've just been steadily getting worse over time, losing more and more of my life to this brain fog and lethargy.

Just a couple weeks ago, a referral to a specialist I was waiting on since February finally got back to me to say "We faxed your family doctor back in June to say we weren't taking any CFS patients, didn't he tell you?" And of course, he didn't. This is the third time he hasn't told me that a referral has fallen through and I had to find out months later on my own.

Years of my life have been taken up by this. Waiting months and months on a referral only to find it's a dead end and having to start all over again. And because of the current family doctor crisis and other health system issues it takes months for me to get another appointment with my GP just to discuss this all and have the process repeated for another year and a half to year-long wait.

Anyway… I'm sorry for rambling at you all! Long story short, I've been losing myself into a lot of escapism-type games that require little brain. And unfortunately, taking screenshots and writing gameplay stories for the Sims takes just a little too much brain for me to be able to do it reliably. So I've been taking a break from the social side of Simblr, and just letting myself play how I want for a while at my own pace.

Other than playing games I've been getting heavily into embroidery. When I have good days where I can actually focus long enough to work on it I've been really enjoying myself! Here's an example of some of the things I've made:

I miss being creative. I miss drawing, I miss writing, I miss creating things. I mourn for the life I could have had if it hadn't been taken away from me by CFS. But I'm grateful that I'm here, I'm grateful that I'm not in pain, that I'm otherwise healthy, that my family and friends and pets are wonderful and healthy, and that I can still embroider and make nice things when my body allows me to. Things aren't all bad. <3

Thank you for reading this far, if you have. I miss you all, and I hope you're all well! Keep being awesome, you're all so good at it. 🥰