The Gregory Legacy, Chapter 38

Hey guys! I'm back with another update after an unintentional break. This is also my first post that counts for Boolprop's SimNaWriMo, so let's get some words and pics up in here. Better late than never, right? Last chapter we saw Isaac get married, finally finishing off the gen. 6 kids, and then we saw the birth of the first of gen. 7, identical twins Eleanor and Eileen, who became absolutely adorable toddlers. That basically brings us up to date. Dive in!

Here's another cutie-patootie baby cowplant. I . . . I mean, Faye . . . just wanted another one. No one is doing the gardening aspiration now, but I like having them around. They're interesting and the news for Cats and Dogs hadn't dropped yet when I was playing this, so cowplants filled a miniscule part of that pets void in my game.

Celeste finally gets back to the Arts Quarter to finish that review that she was oddly unable to find anyone performing for at 3 in the morning. She finds a random guy playing violin and proceeds to review his performance.

Celeste: "Hmm, yes, this is a very lovely piece. Technically difficult but such moving decrescendos! The minor key is haunting, and the bow-work is truly masterful."

Celeste: "Just kidding. Your violin playing makes me want to barf. Or maybe that's my morning sickness. Oh well. Got what I needed. Laters." 

Eleanor: "Daddy! Daddy! I didn't miss the potty this time!"
Rafael: "Oh, Ellie, we're so proud of you! What a wonderful day this is - you finally max the potty skill and manage to make it in the potty for the first time ever! Who's a good little girl?"
Eileen: "Please. I've been using it successfully every time since I grew up. Where's my parade?"

Eileen's face, OMG. Dying here.

Rafael, under my very-necessary guidance, decides to make himself useful and feeds the girls a full meal down in the dining room for the first time in their lives. 

Eileen: "What is this? It's not salad that miraculously appears on my nursery floor, but it's so yummy!" 

Eleanor: "PB&J for everyone!!" *splat*

Yeah, they had a good time in those high chairs.

Poor pregnant Celeste is exhausted and I let Rafael sleep with her for once because with him having to sleep in the tent, they haven't been in the same bed for a while. For some reason, I have so much trouble with the 'sleep in tent 5 nights' requirement. Even when I let him sleep there the entire night, sometimes it doesn't register, so it's just a crapshoot of making him do it until it completes. This is why I hate Outdoor Enthusiast. 

Rafael: "Could you please not spray me with the weed killer while I'm working on my mushrooms?"
Faye: "Sorry, boy, it's just you've got some mangy fungus growing on your face that I thought I'd help you out with."
Rafael: "That is my *manly* facial hair, thank you very much."

Good to see Rafael's relationship with the in-laws is still going well.

 Bath time! I have nothing else to say about this. It's just so cute. More toddler spam for you.

And so on . . . 

Celeste is getting very close to giving birth and her belly is huge! She must be pretty uncomfortable. 

Of course, that won't stop her and Raf from getting excited in front of their entire family about knocking boots. Calm it, you two. 

Later, the whole family pitches in to help the toddlers skill up. I really had no idea what I was doing. For instance, I didn't know that the tablets don't make them bored, while the blocks and other things like learning to talk do upset the toddlers, so they barely used the tablets, and I was going back and forth on things trying to figure them out. At least it made for a lot of cute pics. 

Eleanor sees her dad grooving out to children's radio and gets a bright idea. 

Soon Eileen joins in and we have the most adorable little toddler dance party on our hands. Love these guys! 

Celeste is home from another day of work. She's making a pretty good critic, but I think she'll make more progress when she's not constantly pregnant. 

I decided to have Faye retire from her level 10 science career because I had gotten all the inventions I wanted, but then I realized she had a bajillion vacation days saved up, so I am just having her take PTO every workday until either she runs out or the kids grow up. So this is the last we'll see her in her science gear. It was a dastardly good run, Faye! 

It is just so much easier to feed the toddlers in their room with the Hand of God than cart them up and down the stairs, so I've gotten pretty lazy about it. They don't seem to mind. 

Celeste: "Okay, Raf. The baby's coming. I know you freaked out last time, but I really need you here to support me. Can you do that?"
Rafael: "Of course, babe. I am here for you 110%!"
Celeste: "Good. Oh God, here come the contractions again . . ."

Rafael: "Oh wait! I just telepathically realized one of the twins pooped her diaper! I must go 'check toddler' even though my psychic connection already told me what happened!"
Celeste: "Raaaaaaaf!"

Me: "Oh no you don't, Rafael. Sit your ass down." *cancels stupid action*

Rafael: "False alarm. I'll just check my nails instead. Not like anything better's going on. La la la."

If Celeste doesn't kill him first, I might. He is such a lazy, disinterested father on free will. In less annoying news, we have a third girl, so it is an all-female generation because Rafael and Celeste are stopping at three. Her name is Taylor, and she looks . . . like pretty much every other light-skinned baby. So that's cool, I guess.

Eileen did not agree with me that Taylor's arrival is cool. She was very disappointed to have a younger sibling. She'll get over it, though.

With Taylor's birth and the generation being complete, we can finally roll for heiress. And the winner is . . .

Eleanor! The first born twin will be our heiress. No knowing what Taylor looks like yet, but there was a 2/3 chance this face was going to get passed on. Congrats, Eleanor!

Random uninteresting Gregory trivia: Most heirs have been middle children. Faye and now Eleanor were the oldest of their gen. A youngest child has not been heir yet. Proceed accordingly.

While Eileen has Caprese salad for breakfast (give me a break, I just grab the first non-rotten thing I see), I notice that Eleanor is not eating her plate in the playroom with her sister. Where could she be?

Getting her slow movement-skill-level-2 butt down the stairs, I guess. But why? (This was adorable but good Lord is it time consuming!) 

I can only imagine that she decided that, rather than eat on one of the plethora of chairs or couches that we have upstairs, she would eat down within viewing distance of her high chair, to shame me for never feeding them like real toddlers. Okay, okay, Eleanor, I get it. Let's just speed up the eating, yeah? 

Our cowplant has fully sprouted and it's no surprise (with her personality and also gardening skill) that Faye is usually the one taking care of it. We're calling this one Faye Jr. 

Andres had worked on his photography skill a long time ago, and he finally gets to put it to use taking Celeste and Rafael's couple's portrait for the generation. 

They - and Rafael in particular - may drive me crazy sometimes, but they do look cute together. I wish I had a portrait of Natalie and Jaron, but GTW came out after they died and they never haunt together. Someday, though. 

Celeste's had some promotions and is now dressed in this hideously mismatched outfit for work. I've seen Diego Lobo, so I know that even the matched version isn't nice to look out, but this is objectively horrible, and the beret really doesn't help. I don't know how anyone's going to take Celeste's opinion on art (her chosen branch of the critic career) seriously when she dresses like this. 

I was watching Frank, one of the club members, play with Faye Jr. when I realized with a shock that he is the leader of The Gregory Helpers since Kori died. I kind of assumed that the leadership might pass to someone else in the club in the same household (i.e. Faye at the time of Kori's death), but apparently it went to Frank. This cannot stand, and also Celeste needs to lead another club to complete her aspiration.

Celeste: "Frank, seriously. The name is 'The Gregory Helpers.' I am a Gregory, you are a helper. It seems pretty clear to me that Kori would have wanted this left in the family line." 

Frank: "Sigh. Fine. I guess. Can't have anything nice anyway."

Sorry, Frank. It's just right this way.

Laurel: "Congrats on crushing his dreams, honey."
Celeste: "Thanks, Grandma!"

Celeste finished Leader of the Pack, then insta-completed Mansion Baron with the temporary addition of some columns to the lot, and her new aspiration is Bodybuilder because I like her a lot and I want her to be around for a long time.

Since her first 'stranger danger' episode with simRoxy, Eileen has warmed up to her. While simRoxy was preparing to wash the fish tank again (why????? this is such a useless action!), Eileen caught her with a request.

And so Eileen got some story time out of simRoxy, and my simself got to further ingratiate herself into this family. 

Taylor grew up in a not-great ensemble and I once again missed the walking animation, so here she is. 

This is her makeover. She's very cute! I also introduced some eye defaults here, so everyone's eyes are going to look different from now on. Taylor, Eleanor, Eileen, and Faye all have the same formerly light green eyes that are now the same teal shade as the swatch they have in CAS. Anyway, Taylor's trait is clingy, which kind of sucked because she got really sad whenever anyone left for work and the moodlet stuck around forever. Otherwise I didn't notice a real difference in skill-building with a caregiver, which is what it says is the benefit of the trait. I'm giving this one a C-. 

Then it was time for the plantsim challenge. We called Jasmine, who is annoyingly still and forever wearing her growfruit jacket in this file, over and got started. 

Celeste: "Aw, yeah, that holey stump really ties the yard together. Thanks a bunch, Jasmine." 

When I looked at Taylor in CAS doing her makeover, I noticed something strange: she looks a lot like the twins, except with black hair. Do I have some kind of firstborn glitch in my game? I didn't think that happened in this iteration. Am I just so unlucky as to get identical twins and a face clone? I needed to do some investigation, so I temporarily grew all three toddlers up in CAS to compare their YA looks. 

As you can see from this gif, Taylor is extremely, but not totally, similar to the twins, who are indeed identical. I put them all in the same hair and eyebrows to better compare them. Taylor is a bit thinner, and her eyes, eyebrows, and cheekbones are set slightly differently. Otherwise they have the same eye color, same skin, exact same nose from Rafael, and exact same lip shape passed down from Kori that I've been trying to get rid of for two generations. I guess there are a limited number of ways Celeste and Rafael's genes could combine, because these are some very related-looking sisters. Good to know they'll be cute when they're older, though.

Anyway, back from our genetics excursion, there are now three toddlers to care for. Holy hell you guys, somehow the jump from two to three is not linear but exponentially increased in difficulty. I have four adults and a club made exclusively for cleaning and repairing, and yet getting everything the toddlers need in between jobs, cooking, gardening, and socializing is extremely difficult. It was cute to see the three of them together, but three toddlers is really difficult! I also had to rearrange the nursery to fit another bed in, but that's a relatively minor complaint.

As soon as Rafael finishes getting all three in bed, Eleanor is already waking up with a nightmare. I started to feel like I was in a nightmare. 

Eleanor goes and cries for her exhausted mother's attention. Celeste didn't even make it to the bedroom, but at least she didn't pass out on the floor. Celeste responds to her daughter's distress . . . 

. . . by demanding she do flash cards? I don't know either. Whatever works. I pretty much gave up on maxing all their skills since I was still kind of flailing around and there were now three of them, but I was determined to at least get the first reward trait for each girl by getting all of their skills to 3. The twins already had pottying locked down, so it was just a matter of training up the other things and making sure Taylor didn't get ignored. 

It would be hard to ignore Taylor, though. She has this mysterious, not entirely reflected by the relationship panel, grudge against Eleanor. I can only assume the issue is the heirship. She's always throwing hilarious faces behind Eleanor's back and they're only barely friends, while Taylor and Eileen get on like a house on fire. Eileen is close with Eleanor too, so it's just Taylor and Eleanor that seem to have a problem.

Celeste is doing just super with her new Bodybuilder aspiration. Treadmill yoga is the new trend, and her Crashing Crane pose is sure to take off. 

So one afternoon I had just come back from the gym with Celeste (for her aspiration) and the girls were spread to the wind. I went looking around for them and found Eileen and Faye out with Faye Jr. 

Faye Jr.'s udder was full, and Faye went ahead and milked her. The tooltip for the milk was blank, so I have no idea who got eaten, or if they were spat out or ingested. It's just sitting in Faye's inventory because I have no idea what it'll do. But that's not the real story. The interesting thing about this is that Eileen watched the whole thing . . . 

 . . . and then she shrugged and laughed. Oh my God, Faye is so helping to raise a generation of serial killers at this rate.

Celeste later stopped down at the park to go magic bean hunting. This is the redheaded receptionist from the science center whose name I never learned. She is not apparently in an interesting enough mood to give Celeste a bean. 

She got one from Mortimer, though. I think he was confident, but it's been so long since I took these pictures I don't really remember. 

She got another one in Windenburg from this lady, but she was getting pretty tired so she went home again. 

Celeste: "Raf, all the girls have major need problems and they're all outside. What the heck have you been doing while I was gone?"
Eleanor: "Mommy, I'm hungry."
Celeste: "I know, sweetie."
Rafael: "Oh geez, did I forget I had children again? How embarrassing!"
Celeste: *giant, heaving sigh*

I forced Rafael to help with the needs cleanup. He really is the most useless father, and apparently the game thinks so too since it just assumes he didn't do anything to help while he was supposedly home with them. He helps Eleanor with her attention need and imagination skill at the same time. She's too small in this picture to tell, but Taylor is throwing some impressive side-eye back there at Eleanor.

Taylor: "I shall overcome!"

Okay, scary.

Andres has had another promotion. He's making good progress in the career but still has a way to go with earning money for Fabulously Wealthy. 

More forced parenting from Rafael. Looks like everything is peaceful? Look again. 

Eleanor: "I'm on to you."
Taylor: "Whatever. Enjoy your little heirship before the *true* heir takes over."

Oh my, looks like we have a rivalry shaping up.

Taylor: "My time will come. Just you wait."

Dang, girl. Between Eileen approving of Faye milking someone's essence from her carnivorous plant and Taylor's devious scheming, I'm a little worried about these girls. Will Eleanor the heiress turn out alright? Will she even get a chance to be heiress if Taylor has her way? I guess we'll have to find out next time, because this update is drawing to an end. I'm going to try to get some more out this month for SimNoWriMo. I have two chapters' worth of pictures but time is at a premium right now. We'll see what happens. As always, thanks for reading and check in with me at SiMania and Boolprop. Bye!


SimNaWriMo Stats
62 pictures
2879 words