For those of you who haven’t yet been sucked in by the temporal black hole that is The Sims, let me describe it for you so that you can keep away and continue to have something resembling a normal life: basically, the premise is that you create a little pretend family on your computer and tend to their needs — bathing, going to the bathroom, getting better jobs — all the while failing to do the same things yourself.

Though usually immune to the insidious draw of computer games, [Kathy->] has fallen victim to the cunning charm of The Sims, and has been enjoying relaxing in the evening with it from time to time. Now, in spite of her enthusiasm for the game, she was unaware that it was possible to create and add new objects to the game. So as a small practical joke, I stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed on Tuesday and created several paintings that you can buy to go in your Sims’ houses featuring photos of our children on them, and then scattered them liberally throughout her Sims’ home.

The unfortunate thing turns out to be that the game is difficult to play when zoomed in all the way, but the pictures are difficult to discern unless you’re looking at the game at its largest size. So instead of being surprised and delighted at finding pictures of our children in the game house, she was vaguely puzzled by the mysterious paintings of unknown children that had appeared while she wasn’t looking. Sigh.

Anyway, if you’re another Sims junkie, and for some strange reason you’d like to have pictures of our kids in your Sims’ home, you can download the set of four right here. Enjoy!