For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for February 17, 2013

Children will take anything literally when it’s to their advantage.

That kind of jailhouse lawyering will get you a nice seat in the corner for an hour, kid.

I had real problems with cabbage when I was a kid. It was made worse by the fact that Dad grew some awful white, slimy variety which Mum boiled to death. Anyway, one Saturday lunch time there were the usual problems with me pulling my best Calvin faces. As a result I got sent out into the back lobby and wouldn’t be allowed in until I’d eaten the foul stuff. Salvation was at hand though. Aha! There were rows of Wellington boots in the lobby and a little cabbage in each solved the problem. Until they put the boots on by which time the cabbage was dried up and unrecognisable. Fifty years on the s ene remains clear in my mind. What a horrible kid I was.

That is true,she just said"Till they are gone"from the table,and they were gone from the table.

gotta love the childish innocence.

I did try that line in later years.

my son used to put his peas under his plate and then push it down so I couldn’t see them, I finally just stopped serving him peas and to this day he hates peas. Personally I love them.

I still remember my mother catching me in this same act because the toilet didn’t flush everything down the first time!

Broccoli’s not so bad – if it’s COOKED enough! Personally, I don’t care for vegetables that have the consistency of oak trees.

I remember this Sunday strip from Feb. 1984 – VEGETABLES ALL GONE, MA!

I’ll take a ribeye please

I LOVE broccoli and cauliflower!

The same — character, that kept you from posting earlier, appears in the first Lynn’s Notes sentence today. You won’t have to learn HTML after all.

Mom did say Lizzie couldn’t get down from the table until her [vegetables] were all gone.

Gonna make a great litigator(Better’n no Gator at all…)

We were thankful that we had a dog that we could slip food that we didn’t want.

Brussell sprouts, yuck! Just about the only thing I didn’t like back then and still don’t. Oh, and rutabagas. YUCK! :p

0:38 of this trailer looks like brussels sprouts in aspic….http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ywk2_queen-of-blood-1966_music#.USETPqUqP9A

My parents were fond of Cream chipped beef on toast. My dad had been in the Navy and ate it there all the time. They could never understand why I never even tasted that slop.

When my husband was young, he was forced to sit at the table until he finished his peas. Then and now he hates peas! The family table was one of those 50’s formica jobs with chrome legs. Well, the caps on those legs came off easily and guess where the peas went. For years. I would hate to be the person that bought that table at Goodwill in later years and found all of those dried out/rotten peas.

When my son was small, he was never forced to eat a plateful of something he hated. He was, however, required to eat three bites of anything new. If he then said he didn’t like it, I never forced him to eat any more. He discovered a lot of foods that he liked that way.

My Mother’s husband tried to make me eat an egg salad sandwich (Yuck!) and told me that if I did’nt eat it, I would eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After 3 days, my Mother intervened and made him eat it! My Mother accidently made it for me, but she understood I didn’t like it and I would rather starve than eat it and I proved that a lot of times! And I would still rather starve than eat anything with hard boiled eggs, Yuck!!!

Some of my favorite things are things I did not like as a child.

Next to “If you were not that hungry and only ate half your dinner, a kid in Eritrea would sure appreciate the other half!”

This is where my mother would have trotted out “the starving children in Africa”.

I guess that was not a problem in my house because my father ran it the same way he ran his military unit: as leader you eat the same exact food your troops eat and you are always last in line to get served. That helps to ensure that you secure some decent food and enough of it. The sole exception to that, of course, was that my father was allowed to have beer with his dinner, and I had to wait a little while before I could too!

It’s all going to end up in the toilet anyway…