The next day, September 1, "For Better or For Worse" ran as usual, but Michael was once again a small boy, asking his young mother, Elly, to get him a puppy. This began what Johnston called "new-runs", restarting her storyline with a roughly 50/50 mixture of reruns of early strips, and re-workings of 1980s strips that featured the original artwork (sometimes slightly retouched) with new dialogue. The time frame appeared to be 29 years before the present day; the family is correspondingly younger. Michael looks to be about five or six years old, Elizabeth is a small child learning to talk, and the family is also raising a puppy.