Better to be

Round 34: December 2040 (Summer)

last update/next update

Benton 1 household profile

Tate Benton is 70 and Zelda is 65.

(Josie is 38, Charlie and Jack are 28, Camilla is 27, Grace and Everett are 10, Jude is 8 and Andrew is 4.) 

Narrated by Tate Benton

For the first year in a long time, Zelda and I won’t be hosting Christmas at our house. Camilla and Charlie have a house suitable for entertaining now, so they’re going to do it this year.

I was a bit disappointed that they wanted to take it on, as I really enjoying hosting Christmas. All the cooking that so many see as a chore is something I love to do.

But now, I think it’ll work out well. Charlie and Camilla want me to bring a dish, so I’ll still get to cook.

And Zelda will just get to enjoy herself, without rushing around cleaning up or serving everyone else. She loves having the family over but it is a lot of work.

I don’t think Grace and Everett care much where Christmas is, as long as it happens. They’re both very excited.

It’s only a few weeks away and they have both put in their requests for gifts. We appreciate having wishlists for the grandkids, especially now that Grace and Everett are so big. It’s so hard to know what to buy them at this age.

This year though, I think time might be a bigger problem. We’re trying to get gift shopping out of the way but there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day!

Zelda has been taking on most of the Christmas shopping and she recently had a very eventful trip to the mall with Jude and Andrew.

Josie was supposed to be on kid duty that day but she’d been called into the hospital to replace another of the GPs instead. Troy was working, so the job fell to Zelda.

Jude was fine. He was quite content to follow Zelda around and if she asked him to do something, he did it. 

Jude just looked at the guinea pigs in the pet store…

…Andrew had to pull them right out and play with them. 

Jude sat down with Zelda when she needed a break…

…while Andrew decided to bang away at the piano the shopping centre has set up for performances.

We joke that he’s just like Josie was when she was a kid but he’s not quite the same.

Josie was always a bit sneaky when she was naughty. Andrew is too impulsive to be able to be sneaky. 

It’s like he just can’t help himself. He said as much to Zelda when they sat down for some lunch. 

Zelda had fun with the boys but she was definitely exhausted when she got home. 

I was still a bit jealous that Zelda had a day out with the boys while I was flat out at work. 

I’ve had the restaurant closed for a couple of months for refurbishment and we’ve just this week reopened. No major changes but many were necessary, so we spruced up the place a little bit while we were at it. 

You do tend to lose a bit of your customer base when you close for an extended period, so I’m busy trying to build that back up now. 

We serve good food and we have an excellent reputation from before, so I’m confident it will happen. It’s just a matter of getting the word out that we’re open for business again.

And training up the new waitress, Celeste. We lost our waitress when we closed, so Celeste replaced her. 

She’s a hard worker and personally, I like her a lot. 

I can’t deny that she needs a bit of work in the customer service area though. She can come off as a little strange. 

Other times, she appears a bit bored and some enthusiasm wouldn't go astray.

She’ll get there. She’s just inexperienced right now.

I wasn’t sure Jack would ever be truly enthusiastic about taking over the restaurant one day but now that he’s used to the idea, I think he is. I mean, he’s not going to go off to culinary school any time soon but he seems to like the idea of being the owner now. 

Jack actually wants to start helping me already. He has some marketing ideas, which is something I’ve never really done much of. It’s such a relief to know Jack will take such good care of this place when I’m ready to hand over the reins. 

Notes:

• Title is from Better to Be by Liam Finn.
• One more update and then it's the end of the round! The final update will be with the Notts. That will be the actual Christmas update, rather than just the lead-up. I was hoping to get that one out by Christmas Day but it's looking like it might not be until a little bit before New Year's. That will be my goal - more realistic!
• You may or may not have noticed the household profile link at the top of the page. This is an awesome idea that I stole (with permission) from Maisie. I've been toying with doing something similar for years but could never figure out a format I was happy with. Tate and Zelda are the only household with a profile at the moment but I hope to have one for everyone eventually. I won't be adding them to old posts, because I mean them to be a way for people who just want to jump in and start reading, rather than going back and reading everything. They should come in handy for anyone who finds themselves forgetting major details of other people's sim families too! Tate and Zelda's is not incredibly detailed, as I wrote it mostly from memory but I plan to go back through their updates and make sure I haven't missed anything big. ;) Thanks again to Maisie for the idea.
• Zelda sold two novels this round and she's back to crappy royalties. I really want to see how big a cheque I can get but I don't know how much bigger the cheques are going to be while Zelda's still alive. She has plenty of years ahead of her but maybe I should set my sights on Xavier or Sylvia, two possible future writers, as well. 
• Tate's restaurant is the same building as before (it's from TSR and I have the link on Pinterest) but slightly different decor. Sandy's Pizzeria set is perfect for it. 
• Kids need more ways to misbehave in this game! Seriously, you can't even make them argue. It would be good if adults actually had a way to scold them too. There's the Lecture option but that isn't a selectable one and even with allmenus, I don't think you can use it for kids. :\ I probably just need some more pose boxes back but I'm still going slowly with my CC. 
• I thought I took more pictures of Tate and Jack together. :( I was probably just pausing the game looking at how handsome Jack is and then not actually pressing PrintScreen, lol! Don't tell me you guys don't do that with some of your sims! ;) I was going to have Jack and Audrey come over for dinner and ended up cutting it out though, so here are some pics I took of that. 

       I love him. I cannot wait for him and Audrey to breed and pass those genes on!