Long holiday weekend + rain and snow = plenty of time to stay home and play my Legacy Challenge family. Yes, I have no life. ;-) On with the update!

(I tried not to go overboard with the pictures this time, but since I saved them up from a few days of gameplay yet again, it added up to a lot. I’m just warning you.)

After Bree and Leo’s lovely wedding at Shanley Manor, they went on their honeymoon and returned in splendid moods. They tried for a baby and got pregnant on the first attempt! Bree had a very easy pregnancy — no sickness or foul moods, just the usual fatigue and hunger. I had her continue to study, since all she wanted to do was raise her Cooking and Cleaning skills. She didn’t seem to want a job, so I let her stay home, figuring she could take care of the little ones. Leo continued to work his way up the medical career ladder.

Within days, Bree gave birth to a baby boy, whom I named Devin. Everyone seemed eager to help out with the child, including Grandma Nia, who was still working full time as a Business Tycoon. Around this time I noticed that Nia had the fear ‘Email Someone’ in her aspiration panel — I guess Sim elders are afraid of technology? That cracked me up. It’s an easy fear to avoid since I’ve never seen them e-mail anyone autonomously.

By this time I was getting tired of the way I had the house arranged (it was just a hodgepodge of additions, really) and decided to build a new one. I had everyone stand in the street so I could move all of the furniture out of the house, then deleted the wallpapers so I could get some money back for those before deleting the walls. It took three tries (and one game crash), but I finally settled on a design I liked. (I didn’t want to have to rebuild it again anytime soon, so it had to be just right.) It’s sort of sitcom-style like my Dobbins house, which I really like for gameplay because everything is just one or two rooms deep, with bathrooms at the back (which is really the side) of the house. Anyway, here’s the front of the new, improved Shanley manor…

I didn’t have enough money to finish the upstairs, so I had all the beds off to one side and fenced off the rest for storage of aspiration reward objects like Love Tubs and Thinking Caps. Both Nia and Sheldon had a ton of Aspiration Points which would disappear when they passed away, so I tried to use them up, but really, how many Mood Energizers do you need?

Eventually Devin grew into a toddler (the toddler room is the only bedroom downstairs — it’s a pain to have to carry babies up and down the staircase). I was a bit disappointed in his stats — 8 Neatness, 9 Outgoing, 1 Active, 5 Playful, and 4 Nice, for a total of 27 points. His mom had 29, so I was hoping he’d have more, but no such luck. I was glad he wasn’t a Sloppy kid, at least. Here’s his dad tucking him into bed…

At this point, with 6 people in the house, things started to get a little crazy. I was also experiencing major blurriness of my textures within 25 minutes or so of starting the game, so I tried to take pictures of whatever they were doing right when I started up, before things got too horribly fuzzed out. Here’s Nia and Sheldon cuddling on the bed just before some woohoo (I was amazed that Sheldon has soles on his shoes! Nice detail there)…

Here’s Kiara coming home from work — I think at this point she was a Superstar in the athletic career. You’d think Superstars would be picked up in a nice car instead of the white bus, but she had to wait until she was a Coach before that would happen. (Leo went to work at the same time as Nia, so he got to ride in the helicopter. Lucky dog.)

Kiara needed two more points of Mechanical to reach the next level of her career, so I had Sheldon give her lessons on using the Surgical Training Station. She seemed to have a tough time of it.

Devin quickly grew into a child wearing possibly the ugliest outfit in the entire Sims 2 wardrobe. I thought he had kind of bland features, so I gave him a pair of glasses and some messy hair.

Unfortunately I couldn’t do much to improve his rather bland personality. Poor Devin, I’m so hard on him — I have high standards for my legacy heirs! I had Leo and Bree try for another baby to see if we’d get better legacy material, but alas, little Liam had the exact same personality as his brother. So much for variety!