A Family Resemblance

Welcome to all you first time visitors to this blog, as well as those of you who read it regularly (I think that mostly includes me and a couple of relatives if I'm lucky). I feel like someone is choking me right now, not because they actually are, but because I decided to wear a dress shirt and tie today, and ties always have a little bit of a gagging effect on me. Thank goodness I don't work at a place that requires them daily - I can't imagine having to work with so much of my precious oxygen cut off from my brain. Actually, there is supposedly a "business casual" dress code at my place of work, but last time I checked, sweat pants and T-shirts weren't business casual (unless you're a track star), but there's a heck of a lot of that around here, and it's not on me.

I don't know what got me thinking along these lines, but I remember an era where it seemed like every movie I bought featured Ryan Reynolds, and every one of those movies featured a shot of his butt at some point or another. How thankful I am that we seem to be past that era…and that I sold all those movies. That's enough of that random thought for now, though. Ryan Reynolds isn't a sim (though if he were, his butt would be blurred out, thankfully). We are here to talk about sims, so let's change our focus. When we first drop in on the young Wilson family, we find Antonio out and about shopping for some new clothes. Why he'd want to replace those stylish duds he's wearing now, we'll just never know.


Antonio: "It's just not very practical winter wear!"
The funny thing (to me at least) is that Antonio is a full generation older than Katrina and Mia Kay (Katrina is his niece), but you certainly can't tell by looking at the outfit he began his Monkeesim life wearing. Judging by his clothes, he looks younger or at least about the same age as the girls. It just seemed like it was time to update his outfit to something a little more distinguished or respectable. Especially since my sims aren't "allowed" to age into elders, the only way to depict the passage of years is by giving them "older" looking clothes. That's usually the only hope most of my sims ever have of getting new clothes, because generally, I'm not much of a clothes monger. The idea of dressing my sims in a new outfit every day is just too tedious for me. Anyway, Antonio opted to wear a nice leather jacket everywhere instead of a tank top. So now, instead of being under-dressed for the cold months, he's over-dressed for the warm ones.


Antonio: "Didn't they tell you? The 50's are making a comeback!"
No doubt now that Antonio is all dressed up, people will ask him stupid questions like if he has an interview or if he ran out of clean clothes and had to resort to the nice ones or crap along those lines. Oh, wait - I'm thinking of the idiot stuff people ask me every time I wear anything nicer than a Hefty bag with arm and head holes cut in it to work (you'd think I was the biggest slob in town the way they talk it up when I'm not wearing my normal everyday wear). You'll recall from before that even though Katrina had finally had Seth, she was still working, and her and the rest of the family were still taking turns calling out from work to baby sit. You may be thinking that they could have just called the Nanny, but she's one of the most useless sims. Her and the pet trainer should hook up and eat other peoples' food and do nothing together.


Mia Kay: "How did I get stuck having a baby all the time without the fun that comes from making one?"
Aside from the slight change in schedule that came with people calling out to watch Seth, life in the Wilson house was getting boring. Very, VERY boring! Like, "oh my gosh, someone please shoot me and end the misery" boring! I can't say it was the fault of the family, because they were doing everything they could to liven things up, but they'd been stuck in the world's ugliest house with very little to do, and managing their needs and schedules was becoming a big pain in the you-know-what, and nobody had left the house for any reason but to work in ages. Something had to be done. Well, nobody did do anything besides boring stuff and baby watching, and I was at a loss as to how to help them out of that rut, even with my limitless power over my sims.


Katrina: "I guess I could watch the baby, but where's the fun in that?"
Yes, I realized just how hideously dull things had gotten when I took into account the fact that the whole beginning of this post was dominated by discussion of Antonio buying a new jacket and Ryan Reynolds' ass. I'll be sure to make an appointment to get my head checked later and see what the implications of all this are, but for now, our focus is still on what big losers the Wilsons are. The family as a whole was beginning to suffer the same sort of problems the original Wilsons from my TS1 house had encountered, my inability to keep so many people happy at once. Fulfilling needs is tough enough, but once you throw the aspiration meter in there, well, forget about it! Everyone did their best, and having so many people around to help out with the baby did provide enough of a break for everyone that nobody went crazy.


Aimee: "You know, he even looks a little like you!"
Hmmm…that's kind of gross if you think about the implications, but here's a freebie for you: Antonio is NOT Seth's father. That's not even possible, due to how the family was created (the game considers him a parent rather than Katrina's uncle, but close enough). Sorry if you thought you'd discovered the deep down dirty truth about Seth's parentage, but even the bulk of Seth's family was still clueless on that front, so you get to be too. The fact is, by this point, nobody really cared who Seth's dad was - Seth was just sort of there and that was good enough for everyone. It's not like there was room to move anyone else into the house if the father ever did show up and decided he wanted to spend more time with his kid (yes, I know the eight family member limit had not yet been exceeded, but that's not what I'm talking about, all you wiseacres). Anyway, seeing as how Seth was going to become a toddler sooner or later, it made sense to buy some toys and stuff for when he aged. That was the excuse Antonio and Katrina used to buy toys, although they used them quite a bit themselves.


Antonio: "Next time I get to be Robot, and you're Brick Man!"
I hesitated a little to let them buy a Sir Bricks-a-lot, since every time one of my families gets one, they tend to drop everything else to play with the dumb thing, but there was no reason to deprive Seth just because of the strange obsessions of the adult sims. The robot seems to be oddly popular as well, though not nearly as much as the brick. Katrina spent almost her entire day off playing with the toy robot before deciding she should probably spend some time with her own baby too. This gave Antonio just the opening he was looking for to get his hands on the robot. Sadly, he discovered the stupid thing was broken, meaning it wasn't just maternal instinct that made Katrina decide to put it down and pick up Seth instead.


Antonio: "Gah! Robots are supposed to be our faithful servants!"
Those robots break ridiculously easy compared to most other objects that have the potential to get broken. They're pretty easy to repair, though, even for sims who you've never seen pick up a tool in their entire life, and I've never seen anyone get electrocuted fixing a robot before. Anyway, after a span of time that seemed to have no end, Seth's birthday eventually rolled around. Lucky for Seth, I was familiar with the birthday/baby aging process by this point. When it came time for Aiden, my first TS2 baby, to age into a toddler, I could not for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to be doing to assist the process. I kept getting "help with birthday" interactions queued, and had no idea what was supposed to be happening for an entire day…


Katrina: "Hey, what idiot put four candles on the cake?"
Looking back on that picture, you might be wondering who the guy in the red suit is. Could it be Seth's father, there to celebrate his son's first birthday? No. The answer is that he's absolutely nobody of importance! I have no idea who he was or what he was doing at the house, but even intrusive weirdoes with bad fashion sense are happy to celebrate someone's birthday for a free piece of cake. The big news about the whole birthday thing, besides the fact that it was enough of an event to pull in strangers off the street, was that it signified the time when Seth would stop looking like all the other generic sim babies, and finally show signs of his parentage…


Presenting the latest in fashion for baby prison inmates...
Now, to the casual observer, little Seth may appear to be just another baby with overly intelligent looking features and prison inmate looking clothes, but if you're like me and know who the male parent is, the resemblance is astounding. Heck, from the looks of things, the only thing Seth really got from his mom was her skin tone, the rest came from his old man. Unfortunately, for those of you who have yet to make the visual connection between Seth and his father, the mystery remains unsolved for now. Something about Seth aging into a toddler and having a little more personality caused Katrina to start spending a lot more time with him. Suddenly, teaching him to walk and talk and all that good stuff seemed like a lot more fun than spending time with the toy robot. She hadn't been able to teach it a darn thing.


At least one of his parents is finally giving him the time of day!
The whole baby training process seemed a lot easier this time around than it had the last time I remembered having to go through it. I think last time was with Moon Unit Marley, and it seemed to take forever (and it seemed even longer with Jaden and Kati Daniels). That, and Katrina used the aspiration reward milk to speed up the process and give Seth a healthy glow. The stuff worked, though, and before you know it, Seth was able to walk around on his own and say stuff like, "where's my Daddy?" and wander around outside while nobody seemed to have any idea where he was. Katrina tried in vain to get Seth new clothes, but at this point in time, I had yet to figure out how to shop for clothes for children (don't email me about it, I figured it out since). His night time clothing selection was definitely the most "unique".


Seth: "Let me out! I'm not an animal, I'm a human being!"
Those panda pajamas made me laugh like an idiot (perhaps we can simply refer to them as "pandamas"…hehe), and I wasn't in any hurry to get rid of them. The family decided they needed to just accept Seth no matter how odd his everyday wear was. It wasn't as bad as Jaden Daniels' little white tuxedo she wore when she was a baby. The older Seth got, the more space he seemed to take up in the house, and it started to become evident that sooner or later, something was going to have to change. Fitting Katrina and Mia Kay into a small room together worked okay at the moment, and Antonio and Aimee we doing just fine sharing the double bed in their room, but once Seth outgrew his crib, he'd either have to sleep on the couch, or something dramatic would have to take place. Antonio didn't seem particularly concerned about this, because he had other things on his mind…


Antonio: "What's the deal with lady bugs? They get in your house, your car, your pants…I hate em!"
The most logical solutions to the inevitable overcrowding problem were that either Katrina would have to take Seth and go live with Seth's dad, or Antonio and Aimee would have to move out and start their own life together elsewhere. Aimee had supported the family, bought the new house, and paid most of the bills since she first moved in with the Wilsons, yet it seems like having to stay in the world's ugliest house sharing cramped quarters with a bunch of nuts like the Wilson gang would sort of be like getting the short end of the stick. At this point, Aimee was just waiting to hear anything at all from Antonio as far as when they'd actually be getting married, but as with the identity of Seth's father, that remains a mystery. We'll be putting all this mysterious stuff on hold for the time being, though, as we visit Kitty, Marty, Julie, and J.D. for a bit, and see what they're trying to pass off has having a life. See you next time! :-)