When baby tears sims 4 complaints broke me during a 3am twin meltdown

It was 3:14 in the morning, and I was illuminated entirely by the sickly blue glow of my phone screen while Twin A writhed against my shoulder like a damp, furious sack of potatoes. Twin B was mercifully unconscious in the Moses basket across the room, leaving me to perform the deeply undignified bounce-and-sway dance that all parents eventually master. Desperate to keep my own brain from dissolving into the ether, I was scrolling through Reddit, which is how I discovered that the gaming community was having a collective, catastrophic meltdown over a recent video game update that made digital infants too realistic.

Players were genuinely, furiously typing out multi-paragraph rants about how the new infants in the game wouldn't stop crying, complaining bitterly that their virtual avatars couldn't even put the baby down to go to the toilet without triggering a screaming fit. I read these complaints while wearing a t-shirt that had been aggressively christened with sour milk three hours prior, my lower back screaming in sympathy with my daughter. The sheer audacity of complaining about virtual infant sorrow while I was currently trapped in a hostage situation with a real, biological entity that had been shrieking for forty-five straight minutes nearly broke my sleep-deprived mind.

The absolute tragedy of the interrupted action queue

The thing that really set the gamers off, apparently, was that the crying was interrupting their "action queue." For those uninitiated in the ways of digital dollhouses, an action queue is a neat little row of tasks you line up for your character to do: make a salad, take a shower, sleep for exactly eight hours. The gamers were livid because the digital baby would start wailing, and the avatar would drop the salad to go soothe it.

I read this and let out a laugh so bitter it startled the cat. An action queue. Imagine having an action queue in real life. My daily plan usually consists of grand ambitions like "drink one cup of tea while it's still warm" or "put on trousers that don't have yogurt smeared on the thigh," and even those get instantly derailed because Twin B has figured out how to remove her own nappy and is making a break for the hallway. Parenting is essentially just one long, infinitely interrupted action queue where the tasks keep multiplying and none of the cheat codes work.

I suppose it's nice that the developers tried to make the game accurate to the crushing reality of new parenthood, but honestly, nobody plays video games to experience the creeping dread of the witching hour.

The great biological mystery of the dry cry

Here's a funny little fact that the video game developers actually got entirely wrong, which I only know because I panic-asked a medical professional about it during our first week home. In the game, the digital infants are crying massive, cartoonish droplets right out of the pixelated womb. But in real life, newborn screaming is a shockingly dry affair.

When the twins first arrived, they would perform these face-reddening, lung-busting arias of absolute misery, but their cheeks remained entirely dry. I was convinced they were dangerously dehydrated or that I had somehow broken them. Our health visitor, a spectacularly no-nonsense woman who drank my terrible instant coffee without complaining, waved away my panic and muttered something about how their lacrimal ducts just haven't figured out the plumbing yet. Apparently, the actual waterworks don't really switch on until they're somewhere around a month or two old, which means you get to endure weeks of deafening, tearless shrieking before you ever see a real baby tear.

When the actual wetness did finally show up, it brought its own weird brand of chaos. Twin A developed this lovely condition where her eye just constantly leaked a sticky yellow goo, which the NHS nurse at the clinic cheerfully informed me was probably just a blocked duct and entirely normal for newborns, meaning I spent three weeks gently wiping crust away with damp cotton wool while trying not to gag.

Frantic flailing masquerading as soothing techniques

The gamers were swapping tips on how to silence their digital offspring, mostly involving clicking a button that said "Soothe." If only. If I could just hover my finger over Twin A's forehead and click a button to stop the wailing, I'd pay a frankly obscene amount of money for the privilege. Instead, real life requires you to construct a very specific, sweat-inducing sequence of physical maneuvers just to lower the volume by twenty percent.

There's this American doctor who wrote a book suggesting you do these five specific things starting with the letter S, which sounds terribly organized when you read it in the middle of a sunny Tuesday afternoon, but at 3am you just end up trying to tightly wrap them in a blanket while violently jiggling them and aggressively hissing "shhhhh" into their face until one of you passes out from exhaustion.

The reality is that sometimes babies just cry. They cry because they're tired, they cry because they're hungry, they cry because the wall is the wrong color, or because they suddenly remembered they used to live in a warm, dark jacuzzi and now they're forced to exist in a bright, cold flat in Zone 3 where someone keeps wiping their bum with cold wipes. You can check all the boxes—fed, burped, clean nappy, not too hot—and they'll still look you dead in the eye and scream.

When the mouth becomes a weapon of mass destruction

Eventually, the crying stops being about the general injustice of existence and starts being about the physical torment of growing bones out of their gums. Teething. The absolute nadir of the infant experience.

When the twins hit the teething stage, the volume in our house reached levels that probably violated local noise ordinances. Everything went into their mouths. My fingers, the edge of the coffee table, the TV remote, a rogue clump of dog hair they found behind the sofa. It was a desperate, tear-filled search for friction.

This is where I must humbly submit the single greatest purchase I made during my first year of fatherhood. I'm not usually one to evangelize about silicone, but the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy legitimately saved what was left of my sanity. Twin A was in the throes of cutting her top front teeth and was operating on about twenty minutes of sleep. I handed her this little flat panda thing mostly just to get my own knuckles out of her mouth. She grabbed it, clamped down on the textured bamboo-looking part, and instantly went completely still. It was like I had performed a magic trick. The shape is perfectly flat and weirdly easy for them to hold when they still have zero fine motor skills, and because it's just one solid piece of food-grade silicone, I could throw it straight into the dishwasher when it inevitably got covered in lint and cat hair.

In a fit of optimism, I also bought the Baby Teething Toy Cactus, thinking they might want some variety. It's perfectly fine—it's green, it's got little bumps on it, it does the job. But for whatever reason, Twin B looked at it with deep suspicion, chewed on one of the cactus arms for roughly twelve seconds, and then threw it across the room where it slid under the radiator. It now lives in the bottom of the nappy bag as an emergency backup. Babies are bizarrely specific in their aesthetic preferences.

If you're dealing with a baby t Rex who's gnawing on your furniture and weeping, you might want to browse our organic teething collection before your coffee table is ruined forever.

The aesthetics of drool management

The other thing they don't warn you about is the sheer volume of fluid a teething baby can produce. It's not just the baby tears; it's the drool. Rivers of it. Soaking through three layers of clothing in an hour. We were going through laundry at a rate that made me genuinely concerned for our water bill.

My mother-in-law, in a very sweet but perhaps overly optimistic gesture, bought us the Crochet Bunny Rattle Teething Toy. Don't get me wrong, it's objectively beautiful. It's got this lovely organic cotton crochet work and a smooth wooden ring, and it looks incredibly tasteful sitting on the nursery shelf, silently mocking the pile of plastic nonsense in the corner. But here's the honest truth: when a furiously teething baby actually uses it, the crochet bunny head absorbs saliva like a sponge. It gets distinctly soggy. I still give it to them because they love the rattling sound, but you do have to pry it away and let it dry out on the radiator, otherwise you're just handing them a cold, wet mop.

Surrendering the action queue

Sitting in the dark that night, reading about angry gamers abandoning their virtual families because the crying was too annoying, I looked down at Twin A. She had finally stopped screaming and was doing that jerky, post-meltdown breathing thing where they randomly sigh in their sleep. Her face was smeared with my own sweat and a bit of spit-up, but she was quiet.

The truth is, there's no patch update coming for real life. You can't turn the volume down in the settings menu, and you can't cancel the crying animation so you can go back to making a digital salad. You just have to sort of ride the wave of the chaos, accepting that your plans for the day are going to be ruined, your clothes are going to be ruined, and your understanding of what constitutes a full night's sleep is permanently altered.

Here are a few wildly unscientific survival tactics I picked up during the worst of it:

• Keep cold things nearby: Chuck the silicone teethers in the fridge. Not the freezer, unless you want them to stick to your child's tongue like a frozen flagpole, but cold enough to numb the gums.
• Lower your standards: If the baby is crying but safe in the cot and you need three minutes to stand in the kitchen and stare blankly at a wall, take the three minutes.
• Invest in earplugs: Not to block out the baby entirely—you'll still hear the crying—but taking the sharp, ear-piercing edge off the screaming does wonders for your own fight-or-flight response.
• Embrace the mess: Don't try to schedule your day with military precision or keep your living room looking like a catalog, just surrender to the inevitable disaster and keep a large stack of muslin cloths within arm's reach at all times.

If you're currently in the trenches of the teething gauntlet and looking for something to help soothe those tender gums (and buy yourself five minutes of silence), check out our full range of teething solutions before your own action queue gets totally derailed.

The messy truth about infant crying (FAQ)

When do babies actually start crying real tears?

Honestly, it takes ages. I spent the first month thinking I had broken my kids because they were screaming their heads off but their eyes were bone dry. The health visitor told me their tear ducts don't really start working properly until they're about 2 to 8 weeks old. When they finally do start leaking, it's usually accompanied by a lot of sticky eye gunk that you've to constantly wipe away.

Is it normal for my baby to cry this much or am I doing it wrong?

If you're asking this question, you're probably doing fine and just really, really tired. Our GP mentioned that it's totally normal for babies to scream for up to three hours a day, peaking around 6 weeks. It's called colic, or the "PURPLE crying" period, which is just a fancy medical way of saying "your baby is going to yell for no logical reason and you just have to survive it."

How do I know if they're teething or just annoyed with me?

With the twins, the main giveaway was the drool. They went from normal babies to producing enough saliva to fill a small wading pool. They also started aggressively gnawing on their own fists, my nose, and the edges of their cots. If they're irritable, waking up more than usual, and trying to eat your furniture, it's probably teeth.

Can I put these silicone teethers in the freezer?

Please don't. I made this mistake once because I was desperate. The fridge is brilliant—it makes the silicone nice and cool and helps numb their sore little gums. But the freezer makes it entirely too hard and too cold, which can honestly hurt their mouths or stick to their lips. Just chuck the panda teether in the fridge for 15 minutes while you make a cup of tea.

What do I do when absolutely nothing stops the crying?

Put them down in a safe space like their cot, walk out of the room, and breathe for a minute. Seriously. There were nights I literally walked out the back door and stood in the damp London drizzle just to reset my brain. If they're fed, clean, and warm, and they're still screaming, sometimes you just have to hold them and let them be mad about the world for a bit. It passes. Eventually.