Sims 3 and my Profile

Hello, again. the last time i posted here we had just got Max.
it's been about two months since then, and he's growing like a weed.
i think he's up to 23 pounds now. wow. the picture on my profile is even more outdated.
for one thing, those glasses broke and i've been wearing my spare pair for a while now.
for another, my hair is way longer. anyway, the reason i'm writing now is to rant about sims 3.
Now i know i usually have screenshots when i talk about sims, (because it's the only thing exciting enough to be worth the effort) but today my mom's computer is down, and that's where all the screenshots are stored. so i'll try to get pictures up later, but don't hold your breath.

So my latest sim family is called Elderstone.
it's the family made to play out my "Elderstone Legacy", a big,
intricate story packed with homemade scrapbook entries and mystical trees.
the general idea is to start with one female, have two kids in each generation,
and pick one female to carry on the family name. i'll also never move my active household from the house i've chosen before the challenge is over.
So the sim i started with is Clarissa Elderstone. i built her a home in sunset valley,
a really small one, to save money. Clarissa had the traits workaholic and neat,
so her lifetime wish was to be the CEO of a mega-corporation.
so i got her a job in the business career, bought a lot of apples she could keep in her inventory to eat on the run, and started making lots of friends. good connections are always a great idea in the business career.
so i had worked my way all the way up to level seven or eight of the business career, (level nine being the goal, and ten being the max) and i had a lot of money,
so i figured why not move to riverview. It's a nice town, frankly a lot more interesting than sunset valley, and it's got fishing spots running throughout the whole map, thus the name riverview. but i forgot one thing. once i moved, i may still have had my career, but all my friends were in a different town. i no longer had all the same connections i had back in sunset valley,
and it took me forever to get enough friends for a promotion.
So Clarissa is working her butt off, eating nothing but apples and sleeping maybe four hours each night, meanwhile I'm trying to find a place to live. once i have my first kid i can never move from the house she was born in, so i want it to be something nice. for a while I'm thinking Elderstone, Clarissa's namesake and the house i lived in when i was playing Piper, my first attempt at the challenge. but it didn't feel right. imagine if your dog died, and you named the next one Rover 2. so i looked around the town, but there was nothing.
i prefer small houses, ones i can navigate easily and don't have any unnecessary rooms.
but there aren't any. they're all either too small, or too big. i tried building my own for a while, but that didn't work out. that's when it hit me. i thought of my cousin's house, how it's nice and small, has a beautiful porch, and fits a family of four, (which is about my max for sim families.)
so i built a replica of his house, and thats what i live in today. it took about three tries to get it right, though.
so i finally move into the new house. i have a living room, a kitchen and a dining room on the first floor, not to mention an elevated porch and a backyard with a treehouse, a seesaw and a sandbox. on the second floor is a small bathroom, a master bedroom, a nursery, and a kids bedroom. not to mention a balcony built right on top of the porch.
now is when i start looking for a husband.
the first thing i think is, let's go to france. i want my heir to have interesting heritage, after all. so i travel to france and walk over to the marketplace, where i start looking around for available guys. i'm looking and looking, when i wander into the bookstore and see Gerard Morel.
we flirt until we have romantic interest status, and then i go home. once home i catch up on work and make a bit more money, until i finally have time to call Gerard and invite him to stay over. so Gerard is at my house and i keep using romantic interactions, but there's still no option to ask him to be my boyfriend. so i think, whatever, and ask him to move in with me.
once he's part of my active household, for whatever reason, the first thing i do is check his relationships, curious to see who he knows in france. and guess what? he's married.
so i go back to france and tell his wife it's over. on that same trip, i have Gerard propose to Clarissa. and that's when i think: let's have the wedding here. at first my goal is to build up enough visa points for a vacation home, and then make enough friends to have a great wedding party. but in the end i think a private wedding would be more romantic, so i go to edit town mode and modify a park in the corner of the screen to have a gazebo and a bridge (to an island in the middle of a lake) and everything. they have a private wedding in the gazebo listening to a beautiful slow song, then watch the stars under a willow tree. it was very romantic. The family name is now Morel. it's a nice name, so i've decided to keep it.
after that i go back to riverview, get Clarissa pregnant, and enable aging.
the race is on. i have big plans for the baby, who i know is a girl and plan to name Hope.
the first thing i do is go to edit town mode and modify a park called "the gazebo" to be "Hope's Park". i get rid of the gazebo and put a giant chinese elm tree in the middle of the park, put a radio there, a hopscotch court, a picnic table, and an outdoor grill. i want Hope to have early memories of the outdoors. after that i go back home and decorate Hope's future room to be really nature-y, with all sorts of plants and wooden furniture. a few days later, Hope is born.
she has the "loves the outdoors" and "good" traits. this is where i skip forwards in time.
i've made the upstairs bathroom bigger, and added a garage. there is also a second bathroom on the first floor. Clarissa and Gerard are both adults, (they started out as young adults)
Hope is a teenager, and she has a little brother, Tad, who became a teen quite recently.
There is a dog in the mix, Nellie, and Hope has her own car. would you like to know what happened to the innocent nature lover? Her character got out of hand, and Hope ended up becoming the tortured artist. she loves taking photos, and she's already mastered the photography skill. her lifetime wish is to be a "visionary", someone who has mastered both the painting and photography skills. she wears lots of black, and her room is full of modern furniture, and photos of her travels. the best part about Hope, though, in my opinion,
is that she's a carbon copy of her father. they have the same hair, the same facial structure, the same nose, the same eyes. and they both have a deep respect for each other. the whole story has gotten out of hand, and Gerard instead of Clarissa is now the main founder, Hope the main sim. Gerard has an entire gallery of photos of Hope in his room, and Hope's favorite subject is her father. they've been all over the world together, to every vacation destination. it's really a great story. there are so many more details in the mix, but it's really hard to explain. more later.