Hello and welcome back to The Morgan Matriarchy!
The household at the beginning of the update, from left to right: Freya (#32, Genesis’s twin), Idris (#35), Wendy (our Matriarch), Ethan (#31), Harry (#34), Tabitha (Wendy’s older sister), Cameron (Tabitha’s son), and Genesis (#33, Freya’s twin, our future Matriarch.)
As always, the generation four guide is here and the generation three guide is here.
Somehow popping out of her grave to read romance novels is just the most Jasmine thing I can think of.
Tabitha settled in for a chat with her, which I thought was just going to be some nice bonding between mother and daughter…
… until Jasmine started yelling at Tabitha, too! I don’t know what has gotten into my Morgans lately.
Last episode’s yelling didn’t dissuade Idris from carrying his tablet into the bathroom to talk with Tabitha while he skilled, though. He does a lot of skilling while conversing. Like I said, he’s a very proactive little dude.
For example.
I’ve been trying to keep up with so much in the household that inviting the gen 4 kids over falls through the cracks sometimes, but I did manage it! Which is apparently great for Undine, since it means she can use our bathtub.
Until Xander interrupted her bath halfway through so that he could greet her, anyway.
And then she had to surrender the bathroom entirely so that Ethan and Xander could do some brotherly bonding.
But don’t worry, she may have lost that particular bathroom battle but she did win the war.
Wendy rejoicing that Ethan being a Young Adult means that the kids have someone else to go to for advice.
Since I changed Ethan’s hair, I had to have him and Wendy redo their official portrait. I approve! The color coordinating outfits was a nice touch on their part.
Ethan had the want to go volunteering with his family, so I sent him and Harry out together. He was so happy about it that I had to get a picture. He’s just such a happy, nurturing little bub.
Meanwhile, Idris is very lucky that that’s not a real rug he’s dumping paint on. >.<
Aaaaaand of course Tabitha spent almost all her free time at the graves. I’m not even exaggerating. Almost every time I checked in on her after I’d been focusing on other sims for a while, she was either already mourning at the graves or on her way to do it. I’ve never seen anything like it.
And yes, at this point she’d been in the house at least three days with a bubbling life bar and was still alive and kicking. I shouldn’t have expected any less from her, really.
The bedroom rug is definitely having the toughest time of the episode.
Now that Ethan was a Young Adult, he was able to properly woo Mackenzie! Under normal circumstances I would have immediately had Ethan get pregnant and married, but of course there wasn’t room in the household for that.
I’ve realized that the red glow is an effect of the Polite Introduction that sims with the Good Manners trait are able to do, I’m just as unsure about why it is programmed that way as Delilah seems to be. (Or maybe she’s just judging EA really, really hard for how the game doesn’t automatically have sims know their siblings, the way I do every single time I realize sims have somehow made it to young adulthood without ever meeting a sibling or three.)
But yes, there was indeed a family gathering for a reason…. it’s Harvestfest.
THIS HAD BETTER NOT BE AN OMEN, REAPER GNOME. STEP AWAY FROM THE COUSIN CAMERON.
Harry and Idris are actually both borderline obsessed with Freya. They constantly roll up wants to interact with her. Maybe they figure they’re safe from the inevitable day she goes full supervillain since they’re related to her.
Even the gnomes know to pay homage to Genesis.
They also decided to take a more active role in child care: potty training Idris, for example.
And helping Freya with her homework.
Freya, for the record, is the only sim I’ve ever seen who failed to appease a gnome but wasn’t punished for it. I guess even the gnomes are afraid to mess with her.
The obligatory batch of family interaction shots!
Xander’s daughter, Simone, did some much appreciated autonomous cleaning for us. Truly a Fitzhugh.
She also got in some play time with her dad, don’t worry.
I have never seen a sim look so smug about loading the dishwasher.
I’ve pretty much kept Faye’s easel on hand in case any visitors want to paint things for us that I can sell, but Wendy has started doing some autonomous painting. She needs it for her career, so I certainly don’t mind.
Yara is actually the latest sim who’s started painting pieces for us, which is nice!
And yes, Tabitha was still alive, so I had her cook Cameron a birthday cake. Since he’s a spare’s descendant rather than a main house kid I let him age naturally.
One of the reasons I’d moved him & Tabitha in was so that he’d have someone to live with in case he was still a Teen while Tabitha died. That didn’t happen, obviously, but I still didn’t move him out right away. I figured Tabitha could die at any moment, and I wanted him to be on hand for it. I would have felt really guilty if I’d moved him out and she’d died shortly thereafter.
Playing dolls with her kids is still Wendy’s #1 parenting activity, pretty much. (Even that one time when she was in labor!)
Carter helped Freya with her homework, too. He’s so good with his younger siblings that I almost want to marry him off and let him have a kid or two of his own. But I’m way too busy with other sims to even think about that right now!
I can’t believe I am willingly letting someone use the violin, but here we are. (I know there are other instruments, but the house is too small for a piano and Genesis is more the violin type than the guitar type.)
Wendy’s writing side hustle is continuing, too. I’ve had her write books about Faye, Jasmine, and herself so far, but I actually switched her over to writing children’s books. I could just really see her writing a children’s series that she dedicates to her grandkids, you know? (Not that she’s actually finished a children’s book yet, but let’s pretend.)
The day has finally come: Wendy has finally had the time and energy to help one of her kids use the slide!
Even though Tabitha’s lingering existence put a lot of my plans for the household on hold, I am really glad I moved her back in. She’s basically Wendy’s second mother, so I’m really happy that those two were able to spend a lot more time together.
I’m less happy that she occasionally supplemented her constant autonomous mourning with some autonomous playing in the trash, but nothing in life is perfect.
Ethan was pretty much still in limbo at this point, since I think he’d want to be a stay-at-home dad, so I didn’t get him a job, and he couldn’t get married or become a dad until there was room in the house. (I try to have spares get pregnant before they move out so that I don’t have to play another household, since I don’t like how it resets the main house.) But I figured I’d at least have him progress his romance with Mackenzie so that they could immediately get married, etc, when the time came.
The time did come for something else, though: Idris’s birthday! He got Glutton (one of his dad’s traits) as his first trait, and is an Artistic Prodigy. And yes, he did age up into the hair and spectacles.
He’s just really, really cool overall. The game gave me some really distinct styles for a number of Wendy’s kids, which makes me really happy since she has a distinct style of her own, too.
His dad, Justin, painted him something for the occasion, so I’ve put it on Idris’s bedroom wall and he’ll take it with him when he grows up and moves out.
Tabitha seems to approve of no longer being the only Evil sim in the family.
Wendy needed to go to a bar/lounge/nightclub venue for her job, so I decided the sisters should make a night of it. This of course started the Generation Three club gathering, which I didn’t really want it to do, but I decided to just go with it because it’s not like I minded any of the cousins being along.
I did, however, make sure the foosball game was sisters only.
Obligatory night out slideshow!
Can we just stop and take a moment to appreciate 1) how freaking cute Cameron is, and 2) how much he looks like Marion?????
So Genesis is going to be our first lesbian heiress. My plan was to download a bunch of female sims who can get others pregnant from the Gallery and add them to the neighborhood. My first stop for that was Kelsey’s 100 baby challenge tag, and while I did find a whole bunch of baby mamas there, I then realized that I might be unintentionally seeding the gene pool, as it were, with a whole lot of positive traits. While this wouldn’t necessarily do me any good (after all, Delilah’s dad is a creative geeky bookworm and Delilah is a jealous kleptomaniac who hates children) I still thought it kind of felt like cheating, so now I’m thinking that I’ll also have Genesis try to hit it off with some of my game generated sims, too, and have kids with them as well.
THE POINT IS that this was also partly inspired by the fact that I saw Isabel here and was immediately like WE MUST HAVE HER GENES. Because I mean, look at her. LOOK AT HER.
At this point in the game they’ve still pretty much just met, because I haven’t had time to even build a friendship between them, but I’m tentatively thinking Isabel will be the first baby mama. Fingers crossed.
She wasn’t the only guest that day: since it was a nice weekend day, I’d decided to have them invite a bunch of family members around, and had Ethan call up Mackenzie, and was in general settled in for a nice quiet day of getting shots of things like Simone judging the heck out of Maribel yet again…
… when the alert popped up that Tabitha’s time had come to an end.
I immediately switched over to her, and my heart pretty much broke, because she had of course made her way to the graveyard for her hourly grieving session.
So yes, the last thing Tabitha did in life was grieve for her mother…
And then she proceeded to die on Jasmine’s grave. It was the saddest sim death I have ever freaking seen.
It really hurt to see Wendy already miserable on her way out to mourn, too. Like I’ve said, Tabitha was more a mother to her than an older sister, and it’s going to be so strange not seeing the two of them together anymore.
Ethan, meanwhile, looked like he was trying to hold Grim back.
And then like he abruptly realized what he’d just done.
One of those moments that almost made me wish this were a narrative legacy: Wendy getting her own space right near Tabitha to mourn. ):
And guess who the only Morgan whose Sad moodlet was buried under a bunch of Playful moodlets was.
Ethan: “… he’s right behind me, isn’t he?”
And there you have it: the last household picture Tabitha will ever be in. ))))))):
There are going to be 100 Morgans (101, counting Faye) at the end of this challenge, and I’ll adore all of them in their own ways, but Tabitha is in a class all her own. I’m really going to miss having her around, and I’ll definitely have to play her again in another save. ❤
The Morgan Matriarchy 