(Strip Number 655, Original Publication Date, 7 April 1985)
Panel 1: We find ourselves watching Elly having to play referee because Mike and Lizzie are fighting about who gets to play with a toy helicopter. She asks them if they can't at least try to get along for more than five minutes or is that simply too much to ask of them.
Panel 2: When she heads back to the kitchen, they resume fighting and she thought-bubbles that yes, it is too much to ask.
Panel 3: As she types up something or other, she's interrupted by the two of them screaming "GIMME IT!!!! LET GO!!! I SAW IT FIRST!!!! DID NOT! DID TOO!! I'M TELLING!!! MOOOOOOMMMMM!!!" because they're engaged in a dispute as to who of the two of them owns some unknown casus belli.
Panel 4: As Rage-Faced Elly stomps down so as to subject her children to her righteous wrath, she thought-bubbles about how she'd had it with how her bellicose brats actually WILL fight over anything.
Panel 5: She then yells that this is the last straw.
Panel 6: Mike says that he already knows this.
Panel 7: As we zoom out to find that Mike and Lizzie are fighting to see who gets the last straw in the box, he tells his baffled mother that he saw it first.
Summary: The irritating thing about this is not that this is going to yield a Little Lynnie Show about how she and Alan seemed to live to battle one another. The irritating thing is that Lynn used this scenario as a title for a collection. Check that. The cover of the book shows us the really extra-irritating thing: John bogarted the second-to-last straw so he could drink a can of Labatts with a straw like the biggest big girl's blouse in Christendom.
