Week Five Part Nine: Lothlorien

Francine (Riedmayer) Whitfill, 37 years old. Aspiration: Knowledge. Lifetime want: Become World-Class Ballet Dancer. Astrological sign: Virgo.
Jihoon Whitfill, 30 years old. Aspiration: Pleasure. Lifetime want: Have 50 Dream Dates. Astrological sign: Cancer.
Lauren Whitfill, 2 years old. Astrological sign: Virgo.

Fran is the third of Beata Riedmayer-Landgraab's six daughters (and the youngest of the ten founders, having been a toddler when she moved to Prosperity Plains). She is very much the middle child of the family--she never had much in common with the twins, who were 10 years older than she was, but she also didn't have much in common with the Landgraab kids, who were all at least 10 years younger than she was. (Note: When composing the intro I realized that Fran should have been born in 2002, not 2003. I'm not going to go back and edit the family trees in the old posts, but I've fixed it now.)

 

Jihoon is the third and youngest (adopted) son of founder Larita Whitfill. His older brothers both married earlier in this round, so Larita is starting to get a decent number of grandchildren, though she'll most likely never hit the 20 grandchildren impossible want. (She's dead, anyway, so it wouldn't have counted.)

Oh, hello. Just let me finish this set and I'll be with you.

Yeah, it's not easy to look like this when you're past 50 and have been pregnant three times, especially...oh, they aren't caught up on that? Okay. Where should I start? During my second pregnancy? Okay, here we go.

Jihoon and I had been married for about six years and our first child, Lauren Elise, was not quite 3. We named her Lauren as an oblique tribute to Jihoon's late mother, Larita. Then her middle name is after Elise Kules, my best friend from college. Lauren was--still is--absolutely the light of our lives; it was just a given that we'd try for another. I mean, I didn't want a huge family like my sister Joan but I wasn't against babies either and Jihoon and I...well, we were--still are--very much in love. So we let nature take its course and found ourselves expecting again.

Our second daughter was born on May 5, 2040, just 9 days before Lauren's birthday. We named her Rishell Veronica after Jihoon's sisters. (Rishell was also my best friend growing up and is still a very dear friend. It's because of her that Jihoon and I met.) Anyway, we decided to call her River for short. It's a little corny, I know, but there aren't a lot of good nicknames out there for Rishell and we didn't want her to get mixed up with her aunt all the time.

With two kids, money was kind of tight, so Jihoon was working really hard to get a promotion. (He worked as a teacher at the time.) He really struggled with some of the material he had to learn, so I'd help him out. Teaching was never really a good fit for him, but it gave us a steady income when we needed it most. I really appreciate that he worked so hard at it so that I could be home with our daughters sometimes and pursue my dancing career other times.

Before we knew it, Lauren was in kindergarten and River was toddling around everywhere. The two of them loved playing at the activity table we bought for them...Lauren favored the blocks, while River loved to color from the moment she could hold a crayon. I could have watched them for hours. I have five sisters myself, and I get along well with all of them, but other than the twins we're all so far apart in age we never experienced this sort of thing. I'm glad my daughters get to experience it.

Jihoon and I hadn't been doing anything to prevent it, but it still took more than four years before I got pregnant again. I was just a few weeks shy of 38 when River was born, so maybe that had something to do with it...my mom has told me that she struggled to get pregnant after Mal was born, and she was just shy of 38 then too. Funny how that happens sometimes.

When I was about 6 months along, our house was broken into! The thief got away, but at least the cop scared him off before he could take anything. And we all slept through the whole thing...I'm glad, too! It was terrifying enough to have a cop wake me up to tell me that there had been a burglar in my house!

Jihoon and I made sure to spend plenty of time with the girls during my pregnancy. They had just turned 8 and 5 respectively, old enough to worry about being displaced by a younger sibling. We made sure to reassure them that we would still have time for them afterwards.

River is in the green dress and Lauren is in the blue.

What we didn't know at the time was that I was carrying twins! It somehow went undetected right up until delivery. I gave birth to my son and thought I was done, but then contractions started up again and next thing I knew I had a boy and a girl. The twins were born on June 1, 2045. We named them Elijah Reed and Tamara Quinn. (Elijah is an oblique tribute to my grandfather, Elwood, and Reed is derived from my maiden name. Tamara is just a name we liked, while Quinn is after my great-uncle Quinton, who was like another grandfather to me.)

Elijah is the one on the floor (poor thing); Tamara is in Fran's arms.

Even though our lives were consumed with taking care of the babies, Lauren and River seemed to adjust well to being big sisters. They could play together at that activity table for hours without needing any kind of adult intervention.

Again, River in the green dress and Lauren in the blue dress.

My family came over a lot as well to help out with the babies. Maggie looks really excited to be an aunt, doesn't she? Malcolm doesn't look so excited to be a step-grandpa, but he's actually great with the kids.

Here's another picture of Maggie and Elijah.

And here's one of Mom with Tamara. She just loves being a grandmother and will drop by all the time just to visit. I think she likes it because she can go home and get a full night's rest afterwards. *grin*

Marion was there too, but she spent the entire time on the ballet barre.

At one point we invited the headmaster of the private school over in the hopes of getting Lauren and River admitted. Unfortunately, things were just too chaotic with the twins and a nanny and my family and all, so they didn't get admitted. Jihoon made sure to pay extra attention to me afterwards so I didn't get depressed. It was a little discouraging, but in our defense we had been blindsided by twins in between when we made the appointment and when the headmaster arrived. Things were just a little out of control.

Jihoon also looks slightly drunk. I bet that wouldn't help get one's kids into private school. 

Despite all the chaos, I wouldn't trade my children for anything in the world.

House pictures! The downstairs is still very unfinished, because they don't have a lot of money.

The upstairs is much closer to being finished...there's a master bath, a nursery, a room for the older girls, a hobby room over the garage, and three bathrooms.

I still love the outside of this house. I think it's one of my best houses.

Several notes:

1. I didn't start noticing "bolts" of attraction between Sims until recently, thanks to reading about it on other Sim blogs. Jihoon and Francine would be doomed in most neighborhoods because they have ZERO bolts. Yet they're an absolutely adorable couple. Whenever I slip in Ruling With An Iron Fist (my preferred play style) Jihoon will immediately go and give Fran a tender kiss. Seriously, it's pretty much the only autonomous action he ever does.

(Relatedly, Jihoon has two bolts for Elise Kules and Fran has two bolts for Darius Kules. Too bad; I'm not doing a Sim version of Wife Swap.)

2. In Sims 3 I think Jihoon would have the Loser trait, poor dear. He seriously takes FOREVER to get skills and friends. It could just be that he seems simpleminded because he's surrounded by Knowledge Sims, though. (His wife is Knowledge, obviously. Then two of his four siblings and both of his sisters-in-law are also Knowledge.) But seriously. FOR-EV-ER.

3. I didn't know until I played this house that the cop could lose a fight with the burglar. At least nothing got stolen and nobody seems to really care, unlike Jihoon's sisters, who were furious for ages and ages after Whitfill Ranch got broken into while they lived there.

4. You might notice that in that picture at the table they're all eating berry pie, NOT cheesecake. The twins totally blindsided me too. Especially since I got a bit of a glitch when they were born...Elijah was born as normal and I got a dialog box prompting me to name him, which I did. Then Francine dropped him on the floor and wouldn't pick him up. I was worried I had a glitchy baby until suddenly Francine clutched her abdomen and spun around AGAIN. Tamara appeared and I got another completely separate dialog box prompting me to name her.

I'm through Week Six in this house (as you might be able to tell) and haven't had any more glitchiness from the twins, so I'm starting to breathe a bit easier.

5. I can't remember if the Landgraab family visit in this post was by invitation or not (I think it was), but Beata really does drop by uninvited all the time. (She also does it with her daughter Joan, but not Edith or Millie so far. Weird.)

6. I invited the headmaster before the twins were born, figuring it wouldn't be too hard to handle one baby and a headmaster visit. (Ha ha ha.) The twins were born Sunday morning or perhaps early afternoon. Fran went to work that afternoon for some reason. Probably she was promotable and I sent her because they desperately needed the money, but I don't remember now. Anyway, she had a want to get River into private school and a fear of her being rejected. She got back right before the headmaster left and I could tell the visit wasn't going to pan out, so I had Jihoon ask her on a date so that her fears rerolled. I'm a chicken. (Also, that date ended up being just Great, not Dream, which means it did nothing to advance Jihoon's lifetime want. It was not a banner day in Lothlorien.)