Welcome to our Forum, gal101.
I agree that it's probably a case of some bad custom content that you probably downloaded from the Sims 3 Exchange or a third party site. This is the reason we don't recommend using third party custom content. It can really mess up other things in your game.
Also, I changed the subject of this thread to make it more specific for the actual issue. It's important that we use subjects that are as specific as possible so we can keep the Forum organized and people will know what the thread is about when they see it.