How Does My Wife Do Mornings?
Looking at today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse, we get to see, once again, some continuity errors with the strip just over the last year. Poor Dr. John Patterson is rushing around so he can take Lizzie to her “sitter” and take Michael to school. The “sitter” turns out to be Anne Nichols who lives so close to their house you can walk to it. So why pack up everything in the car to drive there? Why not walk over?
Michael rides the bus to school. So why pack him up in the car and drive him there? This one is actually less of a problem, because the school could be on the way to work. It would be less complicated though, to let him ride the same bus he rides every day.
Then there is the question: Can you do up your own seat belt? It looks like that Lizzie and Mike are both in 3-point harness car seats, so the answer to that question is probably “No”. The more important question is why would you want your 1-year-old or your 4-year-old to do their own seat belt?
Then there is the question: Where’s your hat? It looks like it is on his head.
Then there is the statement: I put all her things in her stroller. Why would you take a stroller in your car, and then unfold it and take the time to put all the baby’s things in it, before dropping off your baby at the sitter, who lives in walking distance of your house. If it’s the dead of winter with snow on the ground, why would your sitter even need a stroller?
How does your wife do mornings, John Patterson? My guess is that she is not an idiot.
Michael rides the bus to school. So why pack him up in the car and drive him there? This one is actually less of a problem, because the school could be on the way to work. It would be less complicated though, to let him ride the same bus he rides every day.
Then there is the question: Can you do up your own seat belt? It looks like that Lizzie and Mike are both in 3-point harness car seats, so the answer to that question is probably “No”. The more important question is why would you want your 1-year-old or your 4-year-old to do their own seat belt?
Then there is the question: Where’s your hat? It looks like it is on his head.
Then there is the statement: I put all her things in her stroller. Why would you take a stroller in your car, and then unfold it and take the time to put all the baby’s things in it, before dropping off your baby at the sitter, who lives in walking distance of your house. If it’s the dead of winter with snow on the ground, why would your sitter even need a stroller?
How does your wife do mornings, John Patterson? My guess is that she is not an idiot.
posted by howard at 10:23 PM
7 Comments:
hoeard,
How does your wife do mornings, John Patterson? My guess is that she is not an idiot.
I'd bet that she left instructions for him to follow about getting the kids ready too; as a mayyyyyyyun in the Patterverse, though, he's too stooopid to read them. We know that Elly's life is supposed to have been so traumatizingly awful that she HAD to own her kid's horses later on but she didn't go this far to make things hard on herself.
So why pack up everything in the car to drive there? Why not walk over?
I initially thought he'd packed Mike into the car and then walked Liz over to Annie. But then it would be strange for him to have the car positioned where it is, by her porch. So, I dunno. He's stupid.
Also, if Mike's in preschool--this reminds me again of the daycare where Francie comes running out the front door to greet Anthony. This preschool that Mike's been de-aged into seems awfully casual in the way parents drop off their kids. Even my son, in kindergarten, has an orderly procedure that needs to be followed. Students line up outside the front doors--with staff present supervising--and they all file in when it's time to do so.
April_Patterson,
This preschool that Mike's been de-aged into seems awfully casual in the way parents drop off their kids. Even my son, in kindergarten, has an orderly procedure that needs to be followed. Students line up outside the front doors--with staff present supervising--and they all file in when it's time to do so.
Once again, Lynn's lack of knowledge and curiosity betray her; she doesn't know what people who put their kids in kindergarten go through, refuses to ask because she thinks asking questions makes her look weak and ends up looking like a fool.
DreadedCandiru2,
I'd bet that she left instructions for him to follow about getting the kids ready too; as a mayyyyyyyun in the Patterverse, though, he's too stooopid to read them.
We have not seen this connection at all. The best we got was Elly telling John she had premade the food. The purpose of the sequence originally was that John didn’t know where things were in the house, and this was used to vilify him, even though the logical answer was that he and Elly didn’t talk about where she put things he did not regularly use. The difference there was that the things John was doing made a little sense that he would need to do them. This time, Lynn has not taken the time and effort to actually figure out what Elly has to do, or what John would have to do. In both cases, the lack of communication between John and Elly is apparent. You notice in the coffee talk, there has been no one saying, “Oh my husband is stupid the same way John is and we don’t communicate before I go on trips, just like John and Elly did.” No cameras in people’s house for this one.
Once again, Lynn's lack of knowledge and curiosity betray her; she doesn't know what people who put their kids in kindergarten go through, refuses to ask because she thinks asking questions makes her look weak and ends up looking like a fool.
In this case, it isn’t that Lynn refuses to ask questions as she refuses to use her own knowledge of how things were with her son and daughter. She is determined to make it rough on John so he can appreciate Elly’s position, and written it worse than it actually is, in order to convince the readers too. We have seen similar things with the Elly walking Farley in the snow with Lizzie on her back. The easy story line is John has a hard time getting Michael ready and he almost misses the bus. When Lynn stacks the deck to make things hard on her characters, it never works. Instead of feeling sorry for them, we feel that they are idiots for getting themselves in that situation in the first place.
aprilp_katje
I initially thought he'd packed Mike into the car and then walked Liz over to Annie. But then it would be strange for him to have the car positioned where it is, by her porch.
I tried to give him an out too, but like you, the pictures made it clear he drove Lizzie to Anne’s house. We don’t have Anne drawn distinctly, so it may be that Lynn forgot she planned to have Anne do the babysitting for Lizzie until after she did the drawing and before she did the dialogue. She has shown that she is willing to redo dialogue on her strip but, once again, would not redraw a picture unless there is a typewriter involved. On the other hand, it seems so pretty obvious that Lynn is trying to make Elly’s job appear to be worse than it is by loading the deck against John. After all, Elly just has to get Mike ready to catch the bus, and she doesn’t even go out to the bus stop with him. Lizzie normally gets dropped at a sitter for one hour while Elly is taking her writing class and this doesn't even have to happen at the same time Michael is getting ready for school.
This preschool that Mike's been de-aged into seems awfully casual in the way parents drop off their kids.
In my kids’ preschool, you had to take your child directly to their preschool classroom and sign them in. I never went to a preschool when I was growing up, but I remember that when I was in first grade back in 1968 it was very similar. We went directly to the teacher’s classroom. There was no bunch of kids playing in the snow outside the school at the beginning of the school day.
Students line up outside the front doors--with staff present supervising--and they all file in when it's time to do so.
That’s the way it is at my daughter’s school.
howard,
When Lynn stacks the deck to make things hard on her characters, it never works. Instead of feeling sorry for them, we feel that they are idiots for getting themselves in that situation in the first place.
I know; you can't feel sorry for someone so stupid that they forget to take precautions most of us learned in elementary school. It's just not in most people to pity fools.
dreadedcandiru2,
It's just not in most people to pity fools.
If they were played as young, innocents, then you could get away with it. Dr. Patterson is supposed to be an intelligent character, and we have strips to show him that way, so there is no way to relate to him when he is intentionally portrayed as an idiot.
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