smc.243

or do you have to wait for the spring term? I.e. how soon after finishing A levels (college) can you start Uni in the UK?

Laurene

Laureen

Laurine

Laurenne

I have the Sims3 with Ambitions, Late Night and Generations for Windows (I'm running 7) installed on my PC along with a bunch of stuff from the store and of course the updates that took forever to download.

I am considering getting World Adventures and/or Pets just to make the game more interesting, but I've read online (mostly from back in 2009 when it was released) that WA has compatibility issues which requires weeks of downloading and correspondence with EA to fix. I've also read that Pets causes issues with saved games. I have a couple of sims up and running that I like playing with, so I don't really want to start from scratch, plus I'm not keen on spending hours and hours waiting for patches and bought stuff to re-download.

For anyone who recently bought and installed these expansions, are these issues still relevant or has EA sorted them out in the meantime?

Benette or Benedette

These are the only options. Yes, we know they're unusual and no they're not made up.

Eric Harker Deveraux

Hugo Mason Deveraux

The initials of the names we've chosen for our son's first and middle name are EL. His last name is hyphenated, so we see his initials as being ELVW, but my SIL pointed out that most people will only consider the first letter of his last name. The names we chose are family names and they're not changing, but I'd just like to get an idea of how this might go down in the real world.

I’m trying to find some less common masculine names with any of the following meanings:

Hope

Blessed

Promise

Faith

Loyalty

Love

I’m aware of David, Jonathan, Aiden, Barack, Keegan, John, Mathew etc. so please skip those. I’m looking for something a little more original, but not too extreme.

The naming strategy at play here is to use a Gallicised version of a family name. First daughter is called Isabelle after great-grandmother Elizabeth. Hoping to do the same with Margaret or Maria for her little sister. So far all we've got is Margot, which I don't exactly hate, but would like to see if we could do better. Please help!

Male:

Etienne (French form of Stephen)

Benjamin

Female:

Isabelle

Andrea

So here’s the thing...

My sister is in the process of separating from her husband on the grounds that he is ‘feeling stifled’ by the responsibility of caring for a wife and baby. The issue now, is that my sister agreed to let him have the apartment (of which our mother pays the rent) ‘until he finds a place of his own,’ which leaves her and her 8 month old son in need of accommodation. My sister dropped out of college to get married 2 years ago and has been unemployed since. Her husband was laid off in May due to ‘attendance issues’ and is still unemployed, which basically means that neither of them has money to pay their own way.

I have a 3 bedroom house, occupied by myself, my mother and my 2 children who share a room. There literally isn’t space for 2 additional long-term tenants unless my mother and I give up our privacy and let my sister take one of our rooms, which isn’t an option I’m willing to consider.

Also, my sister has never been the most stable of people and is quite prone to flying into a blind rage about absolutely anything. She has a tendency to become depressed and spoke frequently (and graphically) about committing suicide as a teenager – a habit she has now resumed. My mother spent thousands on therapy and antidepressants while we were growing up, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect, which is why I’m hesitating to try and get her into therapy now. I have called a couple of therapists in the area and it is really expensive. I don’t live pay-cheque to pay-cheque exactly, but I dread the idea of dipping into me and my kids’ rainy day money for someone else’s storm (I don’t know if that’s selfish, but it’s honestly how I feel).

Space issues aside, I do not want her around my own children in this state, but at the same time I am terribly concerned about her little boy. I am fairly certain that she suffered (suffers?) from postpartum depression – which she fervently denies – but the reality is that my nephew has spent more time at my and my brother’s homes in the last couple of months than he has with his parents despite the fact that neither of them work. The lease for their apartment can’t be cancelled until June 2011 and neither my mother nor my sister will even consider having her ‘husband’ thrown out, which leaves my hands tied, since I neither pay for the apartment, nor live there.

What complicates matters further, is that my mother is now insisting that my sister must move in with us (she is currently at a friend’s house and the baby is at my brother's), which has lead to some very heated arguments in my own household and is making for a very unpleasant environment all-round. At this point my biggest concern is for my own kids and my nephew, but I’m at a loss for how to handle the situation in a way that won’t tear the whole family apart.

Any advice would be truly truly appreciated.

For example, if I eat a lot of bitter tasting food (like raw chocolate) will the baby be more or less inclined to eat the same stuff when they're grown?

Female:

Andrea

Isabelle

Male:

Stephan

Benjamin