A note on
this post, and on the Ottomas family in Richmond.
I played the Ottomas family in my original Richmond hood. Dee and her brother Pete were the twins Samantha was carrying, when you first load the family. By the time the old hood became unplayable, apart from Dee and Sharla the family were all non-playable, and therefore treated like townies for gameplay purposes. When I recreated the hood I didn't need to recreate them, as there was a new version of the family in the bin.
Of course I couldn't be sure that the new twins would be a girl and a boy, or that they would look anything like their Old Richmond counterparts. So I used Insim to terminate the pregnancy, then I aged everyone up to the right ages, then remade Dee and her brother in CAS. The next step should have been setting the Ottomas parents as their parents, but somehow I forgot. I only realised about a r/l week ago, despite having played Dee before in the new hood - she and Pete were essentially orphaned siblings. So now they have their family back, and Dee was so happy over that! She rolled so many wants to interact with her parents and her siblings, as I played her the past few days... enough to make me change her aspiration from Pleasure/Fortune to Pleasure/Family.
I have some fairly strict rules about changing primary aspiration, but I'm a bit looser with secondary, usually it's something that I feel the sim was telling me anyway, as in this case. So, yeah, she really has changed her attitude, and it ties nicely into the story I already had planned. So far, no marriage or baby wants, but that's ok, she's not changing too fast...
You might notice that the Ottomas women look a bit different in my game, too. I don't use 'cosmetic surgery' much on my sims, as I don't need or even want the whole hood to be beautiful... usually I just fix really extreme stuff, like the plague of townies with ridiculously oversized mouths that I seem to have here. In the case of the Ottomas women, they all had anorexically skinny faces, so I used the slider to fatten out their cheeks a bit. They don't look too bad, when they put on a bit of weight. :) .
There's one other difference in the Richmond Ottomas family. By the time I remade the hood, the grandmother Dora was long gone, but she had a new counterpart in the bin family. I needed more non-playable elders to fill my new retirement home (an apartment building in-game), so rather than killing her off, I used SimPe to change her family ties and make her Peter's sister rather than his mother (named after their deceased mother, of course :) ). She moved in and it couldn't have turned out better... while I was using her to test the home, she fell in love with a townie elder neighbour, so now my Ottomas adult kids have an aunt and uncle living in the retirement home. They're non-playable too, but you'll probably see them, when I play Serdar and Brandi at the home.
