"Overscheduling?" Marjo gasps, as if Gordon spoke about a reality of parenting that was hitherto unknown to her. "I know my audience expects certain achievements related to early childhood parenting to be earned if I want to convince them that I'm paying my dues to the community about child abandonment!"

"Could you please be more specific? Is Supreme Enfantillage one of these?" Yortson asks her.

"Yes!" Marjo then shows the list of achievements required to unlock a household-wide title, Early Childhood Overlord.

Of these, having at least 3 toddlers at any point in time, hosting a perfect baby shower on the first try and, of course, Supreme Enfantillage are the main ones she already have. And she unlocks a new one when she sees Hormizd go from infant to toddler with some toddler skills already accrued from her time as an infant.

"From the looks of it, the most difficult is Supreme Enfantillage, unless the slumber party-related achievement proves more difficult"

"By now you know the hard part of party-hosting in this game is the logistics, and toddlers have a finite lifespan as such, so your window to get, say, Supreme Enfantillage is a lot shorter than speed kisser..." Manolia comments on the relative difficulty of some items on that list.

But then the missing achievements include disciplining toddlers a certain number of times, maxing a toddler's skills before growing into a child, and the latter is what might be a cause for Gordon's concern.

Especially when Marjo tries, for the umpteenth time, to get the adoptees to train what these playdates couldn't: their cognition. Because the items the playdates encouraged the players to have their toddlers use developed motor, communication and imagination skills but not cognition.

They start to throw tantrums, throwing the flashcards off their parents' hands and they start showing signs that it's too much. That, even though Marjo cycled through a household filled to capacity and something's gotta give. That sometimes one of her ghosts had some downtime without wanting it.

"I guess, you probably didn't raid at all, much less competitively, but in competitive online games, often downtime is your worst enemy. So this game seems to punish you for trying to maximize toddlers' uptime..." Sigrun sighs upon seeing the havoc being wreaked by the stress Marjo was inflicting on her adoptees.

When they see the toddlers (sans Hormizd, who's instead made to climb the playset's slide by her trans male) get mad at their parents, Marjo is going down hard on the adoptees, hoping that repeatedly disciplining these toddlers will help them understand that it's inappropriate behavior.

If I can't get any of my adoptees to max out their skills before they become children, Hormizd is my only shot left at doing so. Honestly, at this rate, Hormizd is my only chance anyway, and not simply because she has a head start thanks to the alien cognition trait, Marjo laments the loss of uptime as she has her adult ghosts discipline the adoptees multiple times before she can even have them go to sleep, leaving her with their adult duties along with Hormizd's upbringing. But maybe, if I attempt to make the adoptees get as close as possible to maxing out their skills, I might end up using their tantrums as a discipline farm!

"Sorry for the delay, but overscheduling is a real thing. You know time is a finite resource, but you can't make toddlers act as if they were mini-adults. There might not be a visible stress meter, but you can't always have your adults do flashcards, teach them how to talk, or the kids play with the shape sorter all the time!" Gordon watches in horror the toddlers being scolded.

"I think maxing out their skills now will be worth it once they reach adulthood. They'll have a better foundation for the rest of the journey!"

"Marjo, you're only substituting traumas!" Gordon warns her.

"I adopted three toddlers who survived the wave of mass abandonment, so I now have a full household, I'm not going to play favorites! I want to show the game's community that a traumatic early childhood doesn't hold you back later in life! I want all of them to be functional as adults!"

It shows that Marjo was brought up in a relatively impoverished environment and wants to emulate the life of the rich and powerful in-game, presumably because of her in-game fame as a fashion designer. But if your family is rich enough to adopt anyone, the temptation is great to pile on tons of activities on your kids because you're worried about their future. And yet Marjo wants to show the rest of the game community that she's not a child abandoner. Artabeles has fewer caretakers for more toddlers, so I guess his adoptees have more downtime, Gordon muses while Artabeles signals the chat about... sleeping bags.

"Does everyone have sleeping bags ready?" Artabeles asks players on voice chat, while he buys two adult-sized and six toddler-sized ones.

"No, why?" Marjo asks her fellow player as she collects the net proceeds of her latest outfit sales on the Haunted Bazaar, while the slides have yet to find buyers.

"The slumber party is about to begin soon! I, too, am on track to earn Early Childhood Overlord! That said, with six toddlers, it feels like I spent what feels like forever to discipline them!"

While Gordon, Manolia and Marjo all buy sleeping bags, Artabeles sets up his newly completed mansion to host what he feels is the slumber party to end all slumber parties. A pair of chess tables, a stereo system blasting "world music", and, of course, the playset won through his very own Supreme Enfantillage, in his mansion's inner courtyard.

"Slumber party starts in three, two, one..." Artabeles sends out invites to the party.

It seems like the easiest global gauge task requires having 3 or more characters chat with each other, which was finished in the opening seconds. It seems like slumber parties are easiest when you have players with large households: the global gauge's secondary objectives are a piece of cake then.

"Marjo, cook!" Manolia starts screaming at her as she did previously, a few in-game days before, or just a little over an hour before in real time, as the global gauge asks for a certain number of ghosts eating.

"You have all been treating partying as if it was a haunted park!" Marjo yells at her players.

Follower: Partying is this game's equivalent to a dungeon or a raid

But, in the rush to get her cisfem to cook, Marjo chooses a recipe at random, so they get three-cup chicken.

And she forgot about the personal gauge up to this point. First off, she needs to first provoke a pillow fight. Which seems like release to her own adoptees, after being subjected to a relentless training regimen.

Once the pillow fight ends, she initially asks her toddlers to play in the playset, but it was so crowded that she instead has her other adults use flashcards on them to fill whatever gaps they have, rather than go into the ball pit, much less wait in line for the slide.

After the three-cup chicken platter is exhausted, Artabeles asks everyone to prepare their sleeping bags.

Hormizd, as she's about to fall asleep, levitates the sleeping bag and throws it to her trans male's face. The audience seems a little weirded out...

"What's going on here? Is this some alien power going out of control?" Yortson gasps as Hormizd causes more mayhem by throwing the sleeping bag, using telekinesis.

"Hormizd can't control her power yet. I suspect this is the power aliens wield, and maybe she will be able to control it later!"

While Marjo has her trans male discipline the alien tot for this embarrassing display of ESP, she scrambles to get her other 2 adults to tell stories around the sleeping bags before they're set to fall asleep, too, feeling like the personal gauge needs to be filled. And fast.

This is also worth a YouTube clip, she muses. Yet, as everyone else is asleep, Hormizd is the only one who stays awake, and is about to pull a prank on Artabeles' main, throwing a cardboard plate at him. This makes Marjo's cis male awaken to discipline Hormizd several more times.

"Is everyone's personal gauge full?" Artabeles asks the other three players.

"Yes!" the other three participants answer in unison.

"And... the party ends!" the Iranian expat jumps for joy upon seeing the achievements pop up along with the loot. "Woohoo! I got the Lord of the Slumber title!" He then yells at Marjo. "Marjo, time to host the next slumber party! Now!"

Follower: Partying looks very mechanistic in this game

"That's what you get when you have clear objectives to fulfill and gauges to fill!" Marjo retorts before she issues invites to the second slumber party in the same night.

While Artabeles gets a brand-new bunk bed for his troubles of hosting a perfect slumber party on the first try, he also gets the Lord of the Slumber achievement and title for doing so with ten or more guests. Which also comes with an ornate Polish double bed, and replaces his existing double adult bed by it.

Everyone else, on the other hand, only receives a pair of luxury sleeping bags, one for toddlers and one for older ghosts.

"Why, Artabeles, should I host a second slumber party on the same night as yours? Isn't the point of a slumber party to have the guests sleep at the host's place?" Marjo's face turns red (or as red as an angry mulatto can get).

"With the players we have, we can have a perfect slumber party much faster than a single night!" Manolia makes her assessment.

"Do you want the Early Childhood Overlord title, or at least Lord of the Slumber?" Artabeles starts to feel his blood pressure rise as he makes her question her commitment to redemption.

"I just need to double-check how long I have before my adoptees age out of toddlerhood..."

At the same time, Manolia sells off her old sleeping bags so that she can buy more potties for use in her very own LS run. Also, the slide from her Supreme Enfantillage run found a buyer on the Haunted Bazaar, so she can finally make some headway into repaying her in-game debts.

"Fine, I'll host it!" Manolia offers to host a slumber party out of frustration.

Manolia prays for two things as she starts inviting the guests to the slumber party: that not all toddlers will need to pee simultaneously and that the new potties will be enough to handle the needs.

But she's reminded of the discipline requirement of getting the Early Childhood Overlord and she starts questioning whether she'd be happy with "only" Lord of the Slumber.

It's tough. Sure, a canopy bed is nice, but I'm very, very far behind the discipline requirements of ECO, and is Lord of the Slumber worth it without ECO? Would the title be worth the long-term consequences of farming discipline? The player, wracked by self-doubt, stops short of actually hosting the slumber party.

"What's taking so long?" an impatient Artabeles' blood pressure keeps increasing. "I've fallen so far behind on the discipline requirements of ECO that I'm not even sure I can make it before my adoptee enters childhood!"

"Why are you in such a hurry?" Manolia starts questioning the Iranian expat.

"Manolia, if you're not willing to host it now, I will! Outside of your personal gauge, just discipline the toddlers, understood?" Marjo asks her fellow player before initiating the party herself. "That way you might be able to earn ECO, too!"

This time around, the well-oiled partying machine makes it so that the party lasts only two in-game hours before every gauge is filled. And, of course, Manolia disciplines toddlers a lot more during that span than she did in the previous time she had with her own adoptee.

"Finally, our characters can sleep!" Marjo sighs, when she prematurely ends the party.

But the following in-game days see Manolia host an additional slumber party, along with Gordon's Supreme Enfantillage run, which takes place before he hosts his slumber party.

"Supreme Enfantillage time!" Gordon announces as he starts a playdate.

"But why do you suddenly want to hold the Supreme Enfantillage? You were the one who believed we overstimulated and overscheduled our tots!" Marjo retorts.

"I was burned out on playdates a while back, now I feel like hosting one last playdate before this cycle of partying ends!"

Which, given their experience of playdates, all but guarantees a perfect party, and an equally perfect slumber party.

I now have five clips to cut: Manolia's Supreme Enfantillage run, Artabeles' Lord of the Slumber one, whose highlight will be Hormizd's telekinetic tantrum, as well as guides for both parties, and, of course, the guide to Early Childhood Overlord. But I won't be uploading any of these clips until I actually earn ECO, Marjo muses as her ghosts all sleep, and she has a few minutes of downtime to start cutting the first of these 5 clips.

But when the downtime ends, because Hormizd is having a nightmare, induced by this embarrassing memory of being repeatedly disciplined in public, it marks time for her to have her entire household return home.

"I'm the one who couldn't discipline my toddlers as much as I wanted because I let Gordon and Manolia discipline them for me at parties, so here's the final discipline for Hormizd!" Marjo exclaims while she has the discipline counter for the ECO requirement on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. "Woohoo! There's one last achievement for me to obtain, and then I can play out the rest of their toddlerhood without any regrets"

Speaking of which, she has one last in-game day with the adoptees to max out all their skills, and she feels the clock ticking in on them when she looks at the skills they developed.

I can be thankful for this intensive partying because there's only one skill left for all three of them to develop, cognition! Marjo then has her trans male get all her toddlers together and teach letters and numbers to all, using flash cards, knowing they level skills faster with adult help than without.

And, while she has her trans take care of the tots, she can then put the other two adults to work around the mansion, since her cisfem must work on-site. While periodically checking on their progress.

With the toddlers having spent hours learning about letters and numbers, she sees the adoptees throw tantrums so close to the end, while she sends Hormizd to play in the slide because she maxed out her cognition.

After repeatedly disciplining the adoptees, they can then use their tablets for the final push, buying her trans male some time to get some work done. But when the pangs of hunger start to chip away at the tots' motivation, Marjo has them keep going while her cis male starts cooking a family meal for all 7.

Almost there... almost there! All I need is one of them maxing out their skills, but I'll resume their training for the others after lunch! And this means going to the potty, too... Marjo muses just as the jingle for an achievement arrives, as one of them has finally maxed all tot skills out.

"Woohoo! I'm now an Early Childhood Overlord!" Marjo jumps for joy on air.