Holidays and Calendars

I have some exciting new updates! A day or two ago I spent time fiddling with aging mods to see if I can't balance my game better (I'm liking it so far, further testing then I'll upload it), fiddled with summer school break mods, and uni length all working together to try to help bring some sort of real time to my game. I like the length of seasons being five days, but the toddlers seemed to grow up too quickly, I could never get all their skills in, kids grow up super fast and teens just seem to drag. You could have a teenager in the house and then have another baby and it would become a teenager before the other one has to move out or go to college. IRL, it takes 13 years to become a teenager and you only stay a teenager for 7, so that's like half the time. I had to rebalance it. I also wanted my kids and teens to have the summers off, but the nice hack I had made it so kids had half the year off in Strangetown where it is summer for half the year. I instead picked up his (?) alternate version that does it by quads and then tweaked it to be the second quad. Then I changed all my neighborhoods season rotation to have the years start in spring and the summer break month be the second quad. I prefer looking at the UI with the beginning of the year in Spring. My name is April, and that means 'spring, new beginnings'. Also, calendars used to begin on April 1st, which is where we got the holiday from. From how I see things though, spring really starts in late Feb, so that's pretty close to the beginning of the regular calendar year anyways.

I swapped out some of the pictures in my copy of the MTS calendar from last year to reflect my personal favorites and how I want my seasons and holidays to go. I'm working on making a tiny little mod to it to notify me when it was Christmas, Halloween, New Years, Valentines Day, and the first and last days of school. I personally like Christmas being on the third day of winter, but often it slips past me without realizing.

I've done some initial testing and it looks pretty doable, and on the upside, that also make the calendar more usable because it will set itself to the correct day. I'd love to stay up and work on this more, but I want to go to bed now. My bf was really nice to me today and I want to curl up with him. <3