It won't be long

Round 22: Summer 2015

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Ben and Caterina Nihill are both 60, Max is 28, Zaria Royce is 27 and Joshua Royce-Nihill is 6 months old.
(Leo and Kit are both 55)

Narrated by Max Nihill

Things have definitely changed around here since Josh was born last winter.



We get a lot less sleep, for one thing. Or Zaria does, anyway. Theoretically, it's a shared load but I'm a pretty heavy sleeper and I don't always hear Josh when he cries at night.

So I admit that it's usually Zaria who gets him his bottle and rocks him back to sleep.

I've definitely been slacking so I took Zaria out to dinner to try to make up for it.

Dinner didn't really go that well. The waiter brought us the wrong food. Zaria was hungry and she just wanted to eat and forget about it but I tried to call the waiter back over to complain.

He came back over but just to take Zaria's plate away while she was eating and didn't bother to bring back another plate for her.

We always seem to have a good time together anyway, so if we ignore how hungry we both were when we got home, I guess you could call the night a success.

My sister Olivia just left for college and Mum is keeping in contact with her through IMs and e-mails. She passes on Dad's messages about watching out for college boys and just generally makes sure she's doing okay. Zaria and I have been too busy with Josh to focus on much else but I know Mum is really missing Olivia.

Not that Mum isn't loving being a grandmother.

Josh is a pretty easy-going baby, so he's not hard to love.

Zaria had hoped to find a job in politics before she went back to work after her maternity leave but she was unsuccessful, so she's still at the law firm.

I have Mondays and Tuesdays off, so while Zaria's off at work on those days, I'm a stay-at-home Dad.

I think I'm getting better at taking care of him and I hope it kind of makes up for what a slacker I am with it at night!

Zaria's parents came over for dinner the other night, which has become pretty common since Josh was born. That kid is lucky to have four doting grandparents!

I always make sure I'm the one cooking dinner on those nights. I get the feeling Leo isn't too fond of me so I tend to escape into the kitchen. He's really bothered that Zaria and I have no plans to get married. We don't need to get married! I think Zaria would go for it, if I asked her but frankly, the idea terrifies me.

Thank God Leo has never said anything to me directly. I don't know what I'd tell him and I also don't want him to get my parents on his side and then have them nagging at me.

No, Zaria dominated the conversation most of the night. She wants to change the world and she'll tell anyone who'll listen her ideas on what needs to happen. She'd be perfect for a political career - I hope she gets her foot in the door soon.

Random pics:
A close-up of one of the pictures hanging in the Royce-Nihill dining room. The other is just their family portrait from a few rounds ago, so you've already seen it - this one is hanging on the other side of the wall, behind the seat Caterina was sitting in.

Notes:

• I switched to using Gadwin for my screenshots. I find it a little more fiddly to use than the in-game camera but I don't know. Worth it? I was talking about it with my sister and she sees a huge difference in quality. I'm not sure if I do but I don't have an eye for this sort of stuff.
• There's some sort of weird lighting going on in Josh's nursery. He actually has the same skin tone as both of his parents and three out of his four grandparents but for some reason, he looks darker than any of them when he's in the nursery.
• Zaria's on birth control but she and Max did try for a baby this round (when they actually had the time!) so I guess they don't think they're done yet. Marriage is still not on the cards. Fear of marrying Zaria is still an almost constant fear of Max's.
• Not too much else happened this round but I did notice that Max seems to know he's rich! He got the want to buy a vacation home (you will probably see that later this round) and a day after he bought it, he got the want to buy another one (which he could easily afford).
• I was an idiot this round and completely my elder birthdays! I've decided to age my Sims to elder at 60 now. 62 made more sense to me at one stage but that has long since passed, so I'm sticking to a nice even 60 now. The other Sims who aged, besides Ben and Caterina, are Adam, Filippo, Augustin, Hanna and Arianna. If you're on a slow connection, be prepared for these profiles to take a while to load - the pics are thumbnails but I forgot to resize the full sized versions, so it still might be a little sluggish. Sorry! I'll fix them when I can!
• I don't know if anyone of you have ever had this problem but I got a little glitch while playing this family that I have only ever solved by moving the family off the lot previously. What happens is the Sims run at the same speed but the clock slows waaaaay down, even at top speed. It makes the time Sims are at work and asleep incredibly boring, as you can imagine! Anyway, I was planning to break all the appliances in their house with boolprop, so I could write something in about why they were moving in the middle of an update. While I had it on, I noticed I was getting a lot of errors popping up, which seemed to be from a tree that caught fire outside earlier that day. I selected "Delete" on each of these errors, turned off boolprop and suddenly, the clock was running at the right speed again! So if any of you run into that problem, that might be something you can try to fix it.