Is pregnancy supposed to freeze the aging of the mother for the duration of the pregnancy? And is this happening to anyone else? I don't mean the case of an adult nearing elder having the birthday delayed until after the birth, but a young adult mother near the start of her age bar.
I have only noticed this since the Oct patch, but I might not have noticed it earlier as I had been playing on long lifespan with a mixed age couple. Since the patch, I've wanted to try a legacy. The first attempt, the founder (female) married a young adult with the same number of days to age up as she had. After a few kids (I like playing large families and don't mind living on the lawn), he aged up and then I realized she hadn't had any notification of birthday - her age bar said 15 days to age up. Her oldest was already a teen. I cleared caches and started a second file, and the same thing is happening in that game - the mother's age is freezing every time she gets pregnant, then resuming after the birth.
To me, this looks and feels like a bug. Yes, it can be gotten around with birthday cakes, but tracking time in the game tricky. It could also be by design, though based on aging in The Sims 3, I doubt that.
I haven't decided how to handle this with my second legacy family as I can't be sure when the birthday should occur. I'm thinking of just aging mothers up based on my best guess when their birthdays should be - it's not likely to be as big an issue after the first generation as the # of children will likely drop as I keep some aunts and uncles in the house. I'm also considering just treating this as the one allowable anti-aging usage, so mothers won't have access to potion of youth or the cowplant's essence of life. I don't like just kicking kids out, and instead like completing their child aspirations and part of their teen/adult ones and getting them jobs before moving them out as adults - it would make it a costly (in terms of household chaos) anti-aging method, but interesting for one generation. I can also just ignore this.
Those creating official challenges may want to check to see if this is happening in other people's files, too. It could affect dynasties and baby-related challenges. That said, if it is happening to everyone, it might lend itself interesting variants on those challenges.
thanks,
Jess
