Poor Boy Blues: Kid Mania

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a very handy feature that I was unaware of. If a toddler has the sleepy or exhausted moodlet, you can click on the moodlet and they will go to sleep immediately. This also works for moodlets like Starving (will go to the fridge or grab food that is out), Grungy (will shower), and so on. Use this to significantly lower the pain of your experience should you try to emulate my 7 child shuffle. Thank you to Jennifer for the tip!

When I left off last, Mary had just become a child, Nicola was ready, Oliver was screaming for food, and Ivy was giving birth to twins (Patricia and Quentin). In 7 more days she'll be an elder. In 10 more days, Mary and Nicola will be teens.

With a little basic arithmetic there, you might note that this means there will be a 3 day period where the kids are under the supervision of an uncontrollable elder. That is true. But it's really nothing to be particularly concerned about - all the kids will be children at that point, so it's not as if she'll be constantly getting them out of bed.

Let's take stock. I have the following restrictions still in effect:

• Architecture
• Art Appraisal
• Artist
• Entertainment
• Forensics
• Movie Director
• Naturalist
• Paranormal
• Rock Star
• Sports Agent

I have a completely free choice since I've lifted everything relevant to choice (Journalism, Master Thief, and Military are sufficient, but I've lifted Science as well). I must lift Art Appraisal, since until I do that I cannot buy multiple bookshelves, which I'll need to do in order to clean up Copious Librarian. Of the rest, Naturalist and Paranormal have prestige options. I'm not going to do the Paranormal prestige requirement; having 25 ghosts on the lot (even supposing you're able to collect them all) is not my idea of fun. You'd need to start this one early, which means you'd have to put up with ghosts trashing your queue every night for most of the challenge, often several times a night. That requires more patience than I possess.

I'm also not going to do the Amazing Naturalist. With the collection helper unlocked I certainly could do this, but it would simply drag things out.

With those decisions made, both Paranormal and Naturalist are good things to lift. I have 5 kids, and for the other two this generation I'm going to lift Architecture and Artist. The simplest way to lift Artist will be to have a child excel at Painting and Writing; I'll do that with Oliver. Mary will lift Architect via Art Appraisal/Art Acquisition; Nicola will lift Art Appraisal via Art Appraisal/Appraisals (note that this means they can use Rebel interactions with each other to efficiently raise their Rebel influence). Patrician will lift Paranormal, and Quentin will lift Naturalist.

The thing that is disappointing is that I only have 5 kids. If Wayne wasn't been the Emperor of Evil, I'd invite him around to get Ivy pregnant again - but Emperor of Evil tanked her relationship with him. But nothing says that the father of the spares has to be the same guy. One of her coworkers will do fine.

While you're raising a pile of toddlers, it's handy to have Business cleared. The old general rule still applies: try not to waste your Sims' time. Sure, one of your Sims can empty a potty, but if you have Business cleared, you can just sell it and buy another one.

So Ivy had another pair of twin girls (Renee and Sarah). I'll have Renee concentrate on Entertainment while Sarah does Movie Director. Since I have come to dislike the Celebrity system, I'm going to opt to do these via the Acrobat and Magician professions. With the house now full with 8 Sims, let's take a head count:

• Ivy, the much beleaguered mother. She has 3 days to go until she is an elder, or to put it another way, the latest set of twins are not going to get much in the way of training.
• Mary (Ambitious, Artistic, Friendly), currently a child with 5 days to go, who will lift Architect (via Art Appraisal/Art Acquisition).
• Nicola (Ambitious, Friendly, Genius), currently a child with 5 days to go, who will lift Art Appraisal (via Art Appraisal/Appraisals).
• Oliver (Artistic, Bookworm, Friendly), currently a child with 7 days to go, who will lift Artist (via Comforting Children).
• Patricia (Clumsy, Friendly), currently a toddler with 1 day to go, who will lift Paranormal (via Fortune Teller/Scam Artist).
• Quentin (Easily Impressed, Friendly), currently a toddler with 1 day to go, who will lift Naturalist (via Fortune Teller/Mystic).
• Renee (Clumsy, Couch Potato), a just born infant, who will lift Entertainment (via Acrobat).
• Sarah (Couch Potato, Easily Impressed), a just born infant, who will lift Movie Director (via Magician).

Note that neither of the latter two sets of twins had perfect pregnancies, and the just born set had both traits random. That's not a terribly big problem as I can genetically resequence them later - perhaps even as children, definitely as teens. There will be an extremely dodgy couple of days between Ivy becoming an elder and the oldest twins becoming teens, as at that point Renee and Sarah will still be toddlers. To handle this, I will lock the doors to their rooms and have them sleep on the floor; children cannot let toddlers out of their cribs, but they can feed them. You may recall I recommended against this in an earlier post, and it's still generally a bad idea - but if the alternative is starvation, let the little monsters scream.

The thing to remember about the life stages is as follows:

• Try to be in a good mood throughout most of your pregnancy. I was hampered here by being the only adult in the house; a single teen or other adult would have allowed me a brief Motive Mobile trip, but as it was I could stay neutral with the Moodlet Manager, but couldn't avoid the Sore Back moodlet as birth took place at home (again, couldn't go to the hospital because it would have left the kids at home). As long as you can stay in a good mood, you'll get to pick both of your baby's traits; if you have a yellow mood, as I did for the latest set of twins, they'll both be random (and in between you might get to pick one - I had this with Patricia and Quentin).
• It doesn't matter what mood your infants or toddlers are in. If the toddlers learn all three toddler skills (potty, talking, walking), you pick the trait; otherwise, it's random. So if you can't teach them all three, don't bother to teach them any at all - just have them read the skill books.
• With children and teens, it's all about their grades. If they get good grades, you pick the trait; if they don't, you don't. Their mood is largely irrelevant (except inasmuch as it makes it easier to get good grades); however, you should usually find by the time they are children you have no real problem keeping their mood up.

Yes, toddlers are annoying when you feed them late, or leave them in the crib while you attend to their siblings, but as long as you can teach them the three skills, it doesn't actually matter. (Though obviously don't take this too far - they can't die, but the social worker can still come).

Fairly quickly I meet the first requirement for Oliver:

Ivy will be an elder in 2 days, and she's already best friends with Oliver, so he can complete the requirement for painting a picture of her then. Note that it is absolutely allowed to lift Comforting Children quickly - if you can complete all the requirements as a child, it's allowed. (I'm not sure if it's even possible to do that, but if there is a way, be assured it's legal).

With Ivy's birthday coming at any time, I locked the door and moved the toddlers:

They're not exactly thrilled with this plan. But I did teach them both how to potty, so it could be worse, right? It's only another 2 days until I have teens that can look after them. Of course by that point they'll only be 1 day away from being children, but compromises are like that - nobody gets exactly what they want.

Now, it is true you'll have to put up with a lot of crying and screaming from the toddlers. Just harden your heart. You should have gotten used to things like this back at the start anyway - by this point, you're a hardened professional at ignoring toddler discomfort, am I right?

After putting up with the screams of one night, the newly elder Ivy took her aggression out on the martial arts training post. Oliver captured her essence.

Toddlers have all 6 mood bars. As a child, you can feed them to take care of hunger, you can play peek a boo and hug them to help with social, and they can read toddler books for fun. They'll eventually pass out, to take care of energy.

That leaves bladder and hygiene. Even if they're potty trained - as mine were - their hygiene will still fall; children cannot change the toddler's nappies, which is the only way to restore hygiene. Consequently, at some point your toddlers - if left to be cared for by children - will tank hygiene. This means that they will constantly trigger "Noisy Sim", and anyone on the lot will be awoken (even if on another room, on another level of the house, with locked doors between them) every time they try to sleep. The only recourse is to wait until the toddlers finally collapse from exhaustion.

Sometimes you can get away with a nap. But basically, this is just something you're going to have to put up with. It's hardly fair - note that the toddlers can be happily playing with their books and still trigger this just because they have a dirty nappy - but it's survivable. They don't stay awake forever, and even if they did, they'll eventually grow into children. (This whole "queue stomping" nonsense is one of the things I desperately hope Sims 4 dispenses with. It wasn't funny with ghosts, it isn't funny with crying babies, and I'm hard pressed to hypothesize a situation in which it is funny). Generally speaking Sims with the Heavy Sleeper trait will sleep through it - so keep that in mind if you foresee a situation where you might have to deal with dirty toddlers for a while.

However, there is one thing you can try. Elders will, on occasion, autonomously change a toddler's nappy. You can try and trigger this, but be very careful. The thing you want to avoid is that the elder will put the toddler in a crib - since if they do, the toddler may never get out again until they become a child, and that is a waste of all that skill book reading time. So either lock the room with the cribs in, or just flat out get rid of the cribs. This is not an ideal solution - you don't really want the elder interacting with the toddlers, as it is rarely an efficient use of their time - but it is probably worth trying to trigger this just to get the kids to sleep. (And getting woken up will tank their fun meters as well). You have a decent chance of getting a bit of a snooze while they're screaming that they're low on energy, but eventually that will wake you as well.

You can see why I didn't advise this course of action. It is one borne of necessity, not choice. (Well, assuming you agree that having 7 kids instead of only 5 counts as necessity).

Oliver completes his portrait of Ivy:

I know, it's very dark. He's probably a neo-Gothic artist. But it doesn't have to be a good portrait. With this complete, Ivy is no longer needed, but there seems little need to kill her off at this stage. I am reasonably confident I can lift Artist before she dies, and then she can just move out. Besides, she has Hardly Hungry, so she could take ages to die.

When Mary and Nicola become teens, I have them both immediately start on the treadmill. When they are not at school, they can train on the treadmill a lot, since the Moodlet Manager can remove the fatigued condition. I'm having them play kicky bag while their sister is on the treadmill, so that Athletics and Rebel are both improving constantly. It is, of course, a high priority to get my teens started on (and ideally finished on) Athletics as quickly as possible - should I forget, then the Admirable Adonis disappears.

The next day, the final two toddlers become children. They had a far from ideal pregnancy, infancy, or toddlerhood, so they got random traits. No problem, I can fix that with genetic resequencing later.

In any case - with no more toddlers, this phase is over. I'll pick it up next time as the 7 siblings proceed to make their various lifts.