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[Games] Re: Arcadia's Sisters' Story KUY Congrats - Round 3
Grandparents
DM: Athena Lexington Wheelwright
DF: Lucas Alexander WheelwrightOldest's Family
DM, 37: Marina Christine Wheelwright
with fling, X: Howard Lawrence Ashton
DD, 3: Amos Ashe Wheelwright
as single mom:
DD,nb: Hadley Marigold WheelwrightMiddle's Family
DM, 30: Chloe Elizabeth Wheelwright
with EX-H, 27: Miles Edward Flynn
DS, 3: Wheelwright-Flynn
with fiance: James Warren Holst
DD,nb: Verity Robin HolstYoungest's Family
DM, 27: Violet Jessica Wheelwright
with hookup: Bryce
DD, 3: Gaia Whirlwind Wheelwright
SO: Damon Lashawn Michaels
SO's DS/DD, 5: Ziggy Hendrix Michaels & Veda Sinclair Michaels--Marina
Following her son's birth and her rash decision to quit her own podcast, Marina was adrift. As a co-creator, she was still making some money from the show, but she was had significant medical bills from Amos's birth and hospital stay. She was spiraling, until an old friend approached her with an unexpected offer... how did she feel about teaching? There was an opening as a nearby arts college, and Marina would be perfect. It was something she had never considered, but it turned out to be perfect. It anchored her life as she re-charged her creative juices and learned to be a mother. When Amos was two, she started a new podcast - a little niche show that interviewed mothers and their adult daughters - that Marina hosted herself. She still kept her day job, but it felt nice to be producing again.Marina and Howard's relationship continued to be strained, especially when it came out that Howard had started dating Marina's long time friend and co-producer, Beth, while she was pregnant. At first, that news really hurt, but after time it gave Marina peace. She'd felt guilt about abandoning her podcast, but seeing Howard and Beth together made her realize that the show would have ended regardless. Howard and Beth stayed together, starting a new show of their own. It hurt Marina that Howard did not want to be an involved father of Amos - he only saw his son once or twice a month - but she did eventually take some comfort in the fact that, as far as step mothers went, Amos was lucky to have a woman like Beth in his life.When Amos was about four years old, Marina felt like she was in a good place. She loved Amos more than life itself (though she was amazed that his personality was so like his father's - analytical and argumentative at four years old! a future lawyer for sure). She had a good career. She had always wanted another child, but after Amos was born she'd never really had time to date. Feeling that time was running out, she made a radical decision to have a baby on her own. Without telling anyone in her family what she planned, she consulted the services of a sperm bank...Chloe
About a year after Lyndon was born, Chloe felt, for the first time, that her life was really going right. She was in love with her sweet, funny son. Therapy had really helped her get over her divorce and build a good co-parenting relationship with Miles, who had grown into a very involved father. She also loved having her sister and niece live with her in the house. Things were looking up. Maybe it was that positive energy that attracted James Holst into her life.James and Chloe met at a book club, of all things. Miles took Lyndon on Tuesday nights, so Chloe had joined a few meetup groups to fill the time. James had just moved to the area and was joining some groups to get to know people. Neither of them were super interested in reading The Kite Runner, but they quickly became very interested in each other. It was a fairytale romance for the first two weeks... until Chloe told James about her son.Chloe hadn't meant to hide Lyndon's existence from James, but book group was her adult time and she'd been keeping her parenting life separate from that. James became very cool towards Chloe for about a week. Truthfully, he liked kids and wanted a large family, but he'd never imagined himself as a stepfather. He'd always imagined a little storybook like for himself and the future Mrs. Holst... but Chloe made him feel happier in the short month they'd known each other than anyone he'd ever dated before. He reached out and apologized for his distance. Before her divorce and motherhood, Chloe might have dismissed someone who'd played games with her heart like that, but her experiences had made her more empathetic toward other people and helped her let go of her high standards. She forgave James and they kept dating. After six months, she introduced James to her son. Six months after that, Violet and Gaia moved out of Chloe's house and James moved in. Not quite six months after that, James proposed. The happy couple barely had time to start wedding planning when they got some big news...Violet
Though she had the easiest birth of the sisters, Violet had the roughest transition into motherhood. She spent a lot of time during her daughters' first year sitting in her room in Chloe's house with Gaia in her arms just feeling stuck. One one hand, she was very lucky. She'd gone from a semi-employed vagabond to a responsible mother in record time. She was considered a reliable employee at the store where she worked and her sister loved having her around - they really relied on each other to get through the struggles of early motherhood. But all the change left her with a serious loss of identify. Chloe kept encouraging her to get out of the house. To appease her sister (and with a little help from Marina, who got her a tuition break), Violet enrolled in a graphic design class when Gaia was a year old. She really loved it. Though they had already helped her with her initial degree, Athena and Lucas decided they would step in again and support Violet while she took a year to retrain as a designer. She moved out of Chloe's house and got a tiny apartment near school, taking on freelance work designing wedding invitations for her friends, who all seemed to be getting married all of the sudden. Inspired, Violet set up a website and started taking on clients, designing custom invitations for weddings, birthdays, baby showers... anything. Her skills as an illustrator gave her a real edge. Her most popular product was her portrait package, wherein she would draw a cartoon version of the bride and groom for their invitations and other stationary.That's how she met Damon. His sister, Dominique, had employed Chloe to draw pictures of herself and her wife as queens for her royalty-themes wedding. Damon found the drawings enchanting and reached out to Violet to see if she could do drawings of his five-year old twins, Ziggy Hendrix (names for his and his ex's favorite musicians) and Veda Sinclair (named for his grandmother and bearing his ex's surname as her middle names). Violet accepted the job and surprised even herself by asking Damon out for a drink after the work was complete. She's really enjoyed talking to him. He was a neat guy. He liked cool music, recommended interesting non-fiction books. He was just generally cool. And she loved that he was a dad. She didn't have many parents friends besides her sisters - it was really cool to have someone to tell her Gaia stories to. They really hit it off, introducing their kids to each other shortly after Gaia's first birthday...Round TwoThe sisters met for coffee and what was supposed to be a planning session for Chloe upcoming wedding, but Chloe had big news... she was pregnant. Instead of having a large wedding as they'd originally planned, she and James and decided to get married the following month at city hall. Both Marina and Violet were surprised at Chloe's choice to let a little thing like pregnancy interfere with her dream wedding, but it was important to her and James to be married before the birth. The wedding and the rest of the pregnancy went off without any complication... until a week before the birth, when James' mother unexpectedly passed away. They used her name as their daughter's middle name to honor her, calling their girl Verity Robin Holst.Throughout her pregnancy, Chloe had been feeling a little sad that she was the only sister pregnant. Though it had been a hard time for all of them, it had been really fun to be a new mother the same time as her sisters and to watch Amos, Lyndon, and Gaia grow up together. So she was overjoyed when about two months before Verity was born, Marina announced that she was pregnant, having quietly made the decision to become a single mother again via sperm donor. Good thing, too, because initially their parents, Athena and Lucas, were not on board and really judged Marina for making the decision to bring a child into the world, on purpose, without a father. Chloe and Violet really helped them change their minds, which Marina was grateful for, as she was deeply hurt by her father and step mother's disapproval. Marina, too, had a daughter, Hadley Marigold Wheelwright, both just six months after her cousin (another early baby, though thankfully not as early as her brother had been). As soon as she held Hadley, Marina knew for certain she had made the right choice for herself and her family.

This message was edited 4/29/2017, 1:30 PM

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