Tora - January 2023

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The Tora Family

Erik is 30, Annie is 32, Owen is 4 and Claire is 7 months

(Debby Gradonni is 55, Reinout Krielman is 36, Abby Gradonni and Marie Gerrits are 32, Sya Gerrits is 31, Anna Zang is 22, Alex Zang and Brian Gradonni are 4 and Felix Gerrits is 2)

Narrated by Erik

Neither Annie or I can believe that Owen is 4 already, and ready for school. He's becoming a real young man, and I love chatting with him.

On the other hand, he's only 4, and he's still my little boy, that loves to play and is constantly begging one of us to play with him.

It's impossible to constantly give in to his want to play with him, but thankfully he has a cousin who's the same age, and Owen loves playing with Brian.

We ask Abby and Reinout quite frequently for play dates so the boys can spend some time together.

Annie loves those play dates for Owen as well, this means she gets to see either her mother, or her sister, or even both. The boys are a nice excuse for them to spend some time together.

Annie is really close to her sister, and although we've been living in Simmeria for many years now, I can see that she still misses having Abby around.

Abby's boyfriend is nice as well, and I consider him a friend. When the girls get together, and the boys get tired of the garden, Reinout and I usually take the boys across the street to the Marina Park.

We're not very much into that girlish chatter, so it's a nice excuse to get out of the house.

Living in Simmeria really has its perks, especially where we live, it's so close to everything. Owen really loves it, because we go out quite a lot. The Rock Aquarium is his absolute favourite.

I don't know where and how he gets all the information, but he knows a lot about all those fish, and he keeps telling me about it, he sometimes surprises me with the things he knows.

He has taken very well into having a little sister as well. He doesn't take much intererst in what she does, but he hasn't been mean either as well.

Claire really isn't a demanding baby, she's pretty happy sitting in her bouncing chair, looking at the world around her.

But she can really enjoy getting attention from her parents, which we are more then happy to give her of course.

I really love those moments when I'm alone with her, when I can give her all of my attention, and when I get all of her attention as well.

I'm sure Owen will like it more when Claire is older, and when she does more. He loves playing with Felix, Marie Sya's kid.

Sya and Marie recently announced that they wanted to expand their family, and that they were going tohrough ivf-treatment again.

It made us think about our own family a little bit more and about adding to it a little bit more.

We both want some more kids, but we're not getting any younger. So after some thinking we agreed on having one more, 3 seems like a perfect number.

We started trying immidiatly since we didn't want the age difference between Owen and the new baby to be too big, and surprisingly we were succesfull almost the first time!

We didn't expect to be succesfull this soon, we thought we had to at least wait several months, but we're very happy about it.

Right after Christmas break it was time for Owen's first day at SimsVille Up Hill Elementary School. Annie took the day of the bring him.

I think she was expecting him to be very hesitant to go play with the other kids, and that he'd stay with her untill she had to leave, but he ran off to the playground. Which I think is much better, but I guess it's not easy for a mother to accept that her little boy is ready to do things on his own.

It gave Annie the time to talk with the other mothers, about their kids, and bond a little bit. Which can never be a bad thing.

I think the hardest part, for every mother there, was when the principal came to say it was time for the mothers to leave, and leave their kids behind.

Later that day when we had dinner all together, you could see that Owen was really tired, but he ensured us that he loved school, and that his first day had been great!

Notes:

• So Annie and Erik are also adding to my already huge number of newborn babies, again! They both rolled the want for another one, and I thought 'why wait?' so I let them. I was kind of hoping it wouldn't go this easy but now I'll have to live with it. Both Annie and Erik had rather high IFS' (6 and 5), but I'm going to let them stop after this one, of at least let them wait a while if they ever roll the want again!
  Baby Tora is due in October 2023.