For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for January 16, 2022

She’d find out about it eventually! ;D

Yep. Elizabeth is right on schedule!

Don’t you check the pockets, mom?

Elly is very consistent about this. She expects her children to check their pockets in order to make their clothes ready to be washed. When they don’t do this and the clothing is wrecked, she screams at her children for their failure. This joke has been repeated a few times now, although usually it involves chewing gum. This is the first time with lipstick.

Me personally, I do the laundry in my house and I check the pockets as a final check before I put clothes in the laundry, precisely to avoid this kind of situation. To me, it’s worth the time to save the clothing.

As for the lipstick that Elizabeth only puts on in school, this is the payoff from a prior comic strip some months back where Elly came down on Elizabeth like a hammer telling her she was too young for makeup and she was forbidden to wear it. Clearly forbidding Elizabeth from wearing makeup led her to this subterfuge.

With my daughter, she got the kid make-up kit when she was pretty young and she decorated Mr. Howtheduck quite nicely (we have pictures).

My wife always checks the pockets for thinks missing.

Why didn’t you check the pockets? Thats the only way to keep Kleenex or other snot rags from leaving lint all over the load.

Here’s a parental tip. Always, always wash your teen kid’s clothes separately. That way, not only won’t you have to figure out what assortment belongs to who, when stuff like this happens it is only THEIR clothes that are ruined. That’s their own tough luck.

My Daughter used to do that!

Nowadays, putting on lipstick is a waste of time, since we all have to wear masks when going out.

Everyone’s going on about emptying pockets. No one is touching upon the sad fact that Liz felt she had to hide the lipstick from her mother. Before I felt my girls were old enough to wear makeup, I discussed it with them & taught them to do it right. When my older daughter turned 13 she only wanted 2 things for her birthday: to go see the latest James Bond movie with her dad, and a tube of mascara. My younger daughter has only worn makeup once, and that was for her middle school semi-formal.

Reminds me of the time I threw my red shorts in the wash and dyed everything pink. And not on purpose

Good morning everyone. Have a blessed day.

rule 1 about doing laundry : Always check the pockets.

Lynn’s Comments:

This, of course, really happened. I found that a hot iron and paper towels helped to get the lipstick out of my light-coloured clothing.

Steve Buscemi wears lipstick while cleaning his sniper rifle, then looks over his hit list. However, he crossed off Billy Madison’s name after he called him up to apologize for his bad attitude towards him as a kid.

well, that worked

I don’t know, white with pink splotches might be in this year.

It’s hard to hide lipstick when it’s written all over your face, and now all over the place.

Our daughters did that with Chapstick – ruined a heck of a lot of clothes!

It seems to be a load of whites, so what ever pocket it was in, had to be very light colored. And yes, it is Elly’s fault completely for not checking the pockets first, as all good launderers know. Now is a good time to teach Liz the tricks of the trade.

I once washed a white fake fur coat with a red crayon in the pocket. The coat and the crayon were my daughter’s. She was 4 at the time. I learned my lesson. After several more washings, the crayon marks faded to the point of not being noticeable any more.

This is reminiscent of the “tie-dyed” clothing of the 1970s. Elizabeth should just go ahead and wear it. She might start another trend, since fashion is known to go in cycles.

And she did find out…the hard way.

Except for April, the kids are old enough to do their own laundry. We transitioned ours over around the ages of 12-13.

For about a year when they were all teens, we rotated cooking and cleanup among the three (everybody got their third week off and we adults covered the weekends). They got allowances that reflected the added responsibilities, even on their week off. They liked it most of the time!

Bigger mistake than the big mistake…

Somedays you find money; somedays it’s lipstick stains. You take the bad with the good…..

This is a load of WHITE clothing. Her Jeans were WHITE that she kept the lipstick in??¿¿¿

Lesson no. 1 when learning to wash clothes: check all the pockets.

My now 37 year old daughter did the same thing with a red crayon when she was 4. Ruined an entire load, including all her newly purchased fall clothing.

It looks sort of pretty though. Tie-dyed.

Been there with a red wax pencil.

I used my older sister’s toothbrush to clean my nails coz I didn’t want to get soap on mine.!

I learned the hard way to always check pockets before running the washer or dryer, because my husband always leaves Kleenex, change, lighters, you name it. Once I won nearly 10 bucks in change in the laundry lottery. Another time, I got a handful of screws, washers, and sawdust!

You can’t keep it in your purse? Does your mom normally look through your purse?

oints to Liz for admitting it’s her fault. But I’m still in favor of further action of some sort to impress the gravity of the situation on Liz. Perhaps I feel that way because that’s how my mother taught me a lesson when I was 5 or 6. I had a beloved pair of white shorts that I wore in the summer. My brother and I found a can of green paint in a neighbor’s garage and I came back home with half-white, half-green shorts. Mom told me, “I’m not buying you a new pair of shorts. You can wear those like they are.” And I did so, until, fortunately, I had outgrown them by the next summer. As for laundry at home, I did a lot of it, with 8 siblings. But the rule was always CHECK THE POCKETS! Didn’t matter that the kids should have done so themselves, “save the clothes” was the basic idea. And also, never just dump the clothes from the laundry basket into the washer. There could be (and were) all sorts of “foreign objects” in the basket at times, that did NOT belong in the washer!

WHY is wearing makeup such a big deal to some. I know my mother was a bit of a puritan when it came to things like lipstick on her kids, but it’s ridiculous. She wore it sometimes, herself.

Idiot..

A rare Sunday strip with dialog.