Season 3

October 7, 2002

Jimmy and Christine scoff at how overprotective Greg and Kim have been with Sam, going so far as to hold the tot's hand when using the playground at the park. Kim disagrees with them, but when Greg starts to visualize Older Sam as a guy who can't do anything for himself without mommy and daddy, he puts his foot down and blasts Kim. When she's resistant to change, Greg goes behind her back, takes Sam to the park with Jimmy, and lets the kid play by himself -- which results in Sam getting hurt. Although Kim is furious with Greg initially, she soon sees Logan doing all the things for himself that she insists on doing for Sam, and comes to terms with how smothering she's been.

October 14, 2002

Big Jimmy and Kitty pay another visit to LA. Greg and Kim learn that Grammy's house was located smack in the middle of two restaurants, because, despite all the offers, she refused to sell it in the face of development. Now that Grammy is gone, Big Jimmy refuses to sell it as well, even though Kitty wants to move into a retirement home. Big Jimmy has a one-on-one with his son to see if he and his family would like to move out of the guest house and into Grammy's house with him and Kitty. Jimmy feels bad that he has to decline the offer, as his father hardly ever reaches out to him. Jimmy soon finds out, though, that the only reason the offer was made is because Grammy left the house to him and not her own son, and Big Jimmy, who's been living in it for free, was worried Jimmy would sell it out from under him. Jimmy is so infuriated that his dad lied to him that he threatens to do just that -- a threat which doesn't last long when Big Jimmy admits he's destitute. Meanwhile, Greg goes sh

October 21, 2002

When Kim arranges a playdate with one of Sam's classmates, she's in for a big surprise when the girl's mother, Jessica, drops off her child - she drops off her sweet, elderly nanny, Sylvia, too. Angry about her uninvited guest, Kim ignores Sylvia at first, but when she changes her mind and gives her the time of day, Sylvia lets her know that Jessica yells at her all the time. She's just afraid to speak out against Jessica for fear of getting fired. After Jessica returns to pick up her kid and Kim witnesses her yelling at Sylvia, she tells Jessica off and asks Sylvia to come to work for her instead. But no sooner than the new nanny starts work than Kim figures out why Sylvia got yelled at -- she's incompetent. Yet Kim feels so bad for Sylvia that she can't bring herself to fire her. At least not until she discovers how many other mothers have had her and how they all managed to get rid of her. Meanwhile, when Jimmy buys a robotic dog for Dominic and then accidentally ruins it when he le

October 28, 2002

When Greg and Kim plan a family trip to Lake Tahoe with the Hughes, Greg remembers a classy restaurant in the area called The Pinnacle Room that his well-to-do uncle always used to tell him about. As he considers eating there a status symbol, it's a big disappointment when Kim tells him they can't book two rooms in the restaurant's lodge, as it's out of Jimmy's and Christine's price range. On the trip, Jimmy is equally irritated when he realizes Greg took a bigger room for himself. After Jimmy puts him on the spot, Greg admits that he took it on purpose because he's always felt held back on account of Jimmy's lack of money. But after a disastrous meal with Kim at the stuffy, snooty Pinnacle Room where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, Greg sees firsthand that the humble life Jimmy lives ain't so bad.

November 4, 2002

Since her doctor put her on bedrest for the week, Kim is in a bind when her babysitter calls and cancels. So Christine offers up Jimmy's babysitting services. Greg and Christine both have to go to the store to pick up stuff for Kim and Jimmy, respectively, so Jimmy recommends they both go together, even though they don't want to. Greg and Christine end up having a surprisingly good time out at the supermarket -- where Greg gets to buy the bread Kim won't let him buy -- that they cap it off with a trip to a coffee shop where Jimmy refuses to go. Kim and Jimmy, who had a bad time together, become jealous when they find out how much fun their spouses had -- and that they're planning to go out again. Greg and Christine are equally jealous when they come back from their second night out to find Jimmy giving Kim a neck rub in her bed. Jimmy and Kim decide to get even with them by pretending they're pals too. But the pair can't keep the facade up after a game of Scrabble gone awry, and blast

November 11, 2002

Greg and Kim worry that they're not making her second pregnancy special after accidentally using the baby's sonogram as scrap paper. To avoid being the kind of parents who ignore their second child, they decide to get the new baby all new stuff, instead of just Sam's hand-me-downs. Jimmy and Christine both think they're overreacting, until Christine realizes they are the kind of parents who ignore their second child; they have tons of videos and photos of Dominic and almost none of Logan. Since Christine has no childhood memories from before she was 4, she assumes Logan won't either, and decides to start faking his childhood photos and videos, using Logan for the walking, talking years, and Sam and hired children for the baby years. After trying unsuccessfully to sell off Sam's nursery set, Kim changes her mind and makes Greg put it in storage just in case Sam might want to pass it on to his children. After Greg gets attacked by a raccoon at the storage locker, he sees how crazy obsess

November 18, 2002

Jimmy saves the day when he spies a strange man breaking into Heidi Klum's trailer, catches him trying on (and eating) her underwear, and holds him down until the police arrive. When the story makes the local news, Jimmy's seen as a hero to everyone except Christine, who's furious that he went beyond the call of duty and risked his life in the process. She demands he quit his security job, which she now considers dangerous, and get the studio to give him a different one. Though he doesn't want to, Jimmy asks Mr. Savitsky to reassign him, and ends up the new landscaping supervisor. He grows to dig landscaping, which gives him a golf caddy and wins him the envy of former security guardmates Billy and Roy, but when he overhears a burglary in process, he tries to be a hero there too by jumping the armed assailant... who, unfortunately for Jimmy, happens to be an actor shooting a film. Meanwhile, Greg develops an addiction to nasal spray and starts having junkie-like cravings -- and later p

November 25, 2002

When Kim and Greg decide to go on TLC's A Baby Story, they run into major problems with their parents. For example, when Kim and Greg announce that they want to name the baby Charlie if it's a boy and Lucy if it's a girl, everyone calls out with their own picks for a girl. Kim's dad wants the baby to be named Rachel, and Greg's mom wants the baby to be named Margaret if it's a girl. The baby indeed turns out to be a girl, and as Kim and Greg are about to pick the baby up from the nursery, they hear Greg's dad stating that he wished that his own daughter were named Emily after his aunt who practically raised him. After overhearing this, Kim and Greg decide to name the baby Emily.

December 16, 2002

When Jimmy lets Kim know that the studio has a two-week paternity leave policy -- that Greg's kept a secret -- she guilts Greg into taking them up on the offer. Though Mr. Savitsky thinks paternity leave is a joke and the policy was only put in the studio handbook under advisement from legal, Greg gets his two weeks off. On his first day at home, Greg finds out that Kim doesn't really have much of anything for him to do. While he begins missing work, Jimmy discovers that he'll lose his sick days if he doesn't use them by the end of the year, so he fakes illness and stays home with Greg and the women. Greg's worries that he's playing hooky aren't helped when Kim drags him to the movies, and he runs into Savitsky -- which makes him fear that the studio's headed for a financial trainwreck because he stayed home. Greg is even more worried when he pays a surprise visit to a company meeting during his leave, and finds a replacement in his chair and things going fine without him. After he com

January 6, 2003

Dominic's school holds their annual Olympics, making Greg a very happy man since the Hughes will be out of the house for two consecutive weekends. But after Dominic bombs at every single event the first weekend -- and wins a bunch of consolation prize trophies just for participating -- Jimmy is far from happy that the school rewards losers, giving Dominic no motivation to get better. Dominic is crushed after he overhears his father badmouthing him to the other adults for winning a bunch of ""garbage trophies"" Jimmy feels he didn't deserve. Realizing he acted exactly like his father would, Jimmy decides to make it up to Dominic by giving him extra encouragement the next weekend. Although Dominic doesn't win, he comes in third place in one event, then tells Jimmy that he spent the week practicing in hopes of improving, because the trophies he won were garbage. Meanwhile, after Greg brings it to Kim's attention that she's overbearing with him when it comes to home decorating, she lets him

January 20, 2003

When the Warners run out of storage room in the garage, Kim makes Greg donate a box of his old belongings to charity. But after the apathetic collection guy calls his stuff crap and tries to throw it out, Greg takes everything back. Meanwhile, when the Hughes run out of room in the guesthouse, and Christine makes Jimmy donate his old belongings to charity, Greg offers to drive him to the pickup center. Greg then surprises Jimmy by showing him what he did with the stuff -- he rented a storage locker, and set up his own private utopia with everything Kim demanded he get rid of. Jimmy piles his old junk in there, and goes along with Greg's plans to keep the place a secret from the women. Together, they offer to do all the wives' errands for them as an excuse to get away and spend some guy time in the locker. Greg and Jimmy meet their storage neighbors -- a record collector and a Star Wars fanatic -- who are in the same bind as they are with their other halves. Greg's volunteering to run a

February 3, 2003

Tom and Natalie call Greg to say they're coming for a visit, because Natalie won Tom a walk-on role on JAG in a charity auction. Greg wants his parents to stay in the guest house, so he nudges Kim to ask Jimmy and Christine to sleep on the living room couch and send Logan to Dominic's room. Kim, who doesn't want the critical Natalie around, is relieved when Jimmy tells her that she'll likely be spending the whole day on the set, since JAG does day-long shoots. Kim's elation is crushed when Natalie says that she isn't going with Tom, she's staying home. Tom anxiously awaits his film debut as a jury member, as it's the first time he's ever acted in front of something besides his mirror. One of the other extras fills him in on how he and all the other ""background actors"" (as they prefer to be called) have perfected personalized moves to help them get discovered. Greg, Natalie, Jimmy and Christine see for themselves just what moves Tom invents when Greg brings home a tape of the dailies. W

February 10, 2003

Christine tells Jimmy not to buy a Valentine's Day gift for her this year, as she's come to the realization that the holiday is just a cheap ploy to get poor schmucks to spend their hard-earned money. Jimmy's glad that they're not exchanging gifts -- until Christine surprises him with a card the day before. Since he assumed a card was a gift, he stalls and gets her to agree to hang onto it until tomorrow, so they can swap on Valentine's Day. He then drags Greg out to the mall to buy one, but it's so last-minute that all the good cards are gone. Desperate, he enlists Greg's aid in tearing down the shop's huge display model, racking up $384 in ceiling damages in the process, and anticipates winning Christine's heart with his life-size card. But the only thing he wins is her wrath after she opens it and sees nothing more than ""Love, Jimmy,"" as opposed to the long, thoughtful message she wrote in her own. Jimmy sulks while going through her old cards to him, until Greg points out to him th

February 17, 2003

Jimmy seeks to put a stop to Big Jimmy's lies that he coached Johnny Bench and other baseball legends in the minor leagues, because Dominic believes him the same way he did when he was a child. Remembering how upset he was when he learned the truth at 13, Jimmy confronts his father, calling him on his lies. Even though there's no record of Big Jimmy having coached anywhere -- and there never was a uniform stored in the Hughes' attic like he said there was -- Big Jimmy insists he's telling the truth. Jimmy takes Greg and Dominic to a baseball card convention, where Greg calls his mother to blast her for throwing out his now-valuable collection and Jimmy tries to undo all the coaching tips Big Jimmy gave Dominic. Greg bumps into Johnny Bench, and learns straight from the source that Big Jimmy coached him in Buffalo, after all. Jimmy has to eat crow when Greg introduces him to Johnny, who in turn introduces them both to Ernie Banks and Frank Robinson, both of whom Big Jimmy coached, too.

February 24, 2003

When nobody believes Greg that his hot, new female co-worker has been flirting with him, he sets up a hidden cam to catch her in the act. Meanwhile, Billy dreams of being a masseur, but has trouble convincing his co-workers to let him practice on them.

March 10, 2003

Kim throws a surprise party at Savitsky's beach house for Greg's birthday, but Greg can't have a good time, fearful that the weekend won't go well.

March 31, 2003

Kim and Christine plan a celebration for their grandmother's 80th birthday, and most of the Ludke family will be in attendance. Greg might be getting a VIP ticket to the NCAA Final Four in New Orleans as a gift from the studio. But the date conflicts with Grandma Nan's birthday, so Kim whines and stomps her feet in hopes that he'll give it away. He gets two tickets, and gives one to Jimmy; that way, he won't be the only one avoiding the party. When Christine hears this, she handles things just like Kim. Both men stand up to their wives, and tell them they're going no matter what, but Kim lays on a guilt trip so thick that Greg eventually throws up his hands, and gives his extra ticket to Jimmy. Jenny arrives with Grandma Nan and Kim's and Christine's aunt, Millie. Greg is irked when he discovers that their uncles were a no-show, and are at home watching the Final Four on TV. Jimmy gives Billy Greg's ticket, and they both meet sportscaster Jim Nantz, who'll be covering the games, and wh

April 14, 2003

Kim and Greg are horrified to find peanuts in the backyard, since Sam is allergic to them. Wondering who was careless enough to bring them into their yard, they soon find the culprit -- a squirrel. Greg sets up a metal trap to catch the little bugger, so that Sam will be able to go outside again. The squirrel takes the bait, but Greg is too afraid to touch it to get rid of it, so Jimmy -- who's just as scared -- has to do the honors. While en route to dispose of it, it gets out of the bag Jimmy put it in, crawls on Jimmy's leg, and ends up out of the car and back in the yard when he and Greg run for cover. Since Kim knows it won't fall for the trap twice, she hints that Greg should kill it. Greg doesn't want to, until Sam asks if he can go outside to play. While he ponders how to off the thing, Jimmy suggests borrowing a pellet gun from Billy. Kim and Christine head off to the beach, Billy pops by dressed like Elmer Fudd, and the three guys get set for some good old-fashioned squirrel

April 28, 2003

Jimmy feels dumb when he's unable to help Dominic with his science project, and decides to go back in school to be smarter... elementary school. Meanwhile, Greg buys a sit-down lawn mower at a yard sale, and takes it upon himself to start mowing his neighbors' lawns.

May 5, 2003

Christine's desire to fit in better at school leads her to join a sorority, which in turns leads Jimmy to beg her to come home so he doesn't have to take care of the kids. After seeing Christine rack her brains trying to study for a test and hearing Greg and Kim talk about the study groups they had, Jimmy tells his wife that she should join a study group. Christine doesn't want to join anything where she'll feel like a square peg, but Jimmy is persuasive enough that she gives her younger classmates' group a shot. She gets cold feet when Jimmy drives her there, and she sees the group is in a sorority house. But, because of Jimmy, she marches right into Phi Sigma Gamma and introduces herself to the sisters, who are in the middle of pledging some new blood. The girls hit it off, and after studying economics, the chapter president, Katie, and her right-hand sister, Maryanne, ask Christine to join the sorority. Since Christine already bore witness to what the pledges have to do (like be hum

May 12, 2003

Mr. Savitsky invites Greg to join him and his new Playmate wife, Lisa, at a charity dinner for the homeless, because he got stuck buying a table and has six seats to fill. Greg makes Kim go -- not because he wants to help the homeless, but because he wants to impress the boss and further his career by having Kim schmooze Lisa. Desperate to help him fill the other four, Greg reluctantly agrees to let Jimmy, Christine, Billy and Billy's price-memorizing supermarket clerk date, Debbie, tag along. When Greg sees Kim not doing what he asked, he orders her to go talk to Lisa, but the woman is such a foul-mouthed, lush-faced, sex-obsessed bimbo that Kim ends the conversation in disgust. After a very smashed Christine steps in and hits it off with Lisa, Greg changes tactics and decides they'll both go to Savitsky's tennis club -- via a trip that Savitsky put up for auction at the dinner -- so the four of them can spend the whole day together and Kim can win Lisa over without it looking despera

May 19, 2003

When Greg tells Jimmy he never does anything for him, Jimmy shares with him a story back in ye olden days -- the 1980s -- when Jimmy, Billy and their friend, Brian, were just a trio of pizza delivery boys with bad hair, and Christine was a lowly waitress at Howard Johnson's. Jimmy flips his lid when Christine lets him know that Kim is coming by with her new boyfriend, as this is going to crush Brian, whom Kim used to be dating before college -- especially since Greg, said new boyfriend, will be staying on Jimmy's couch and mooching off him. When Jimmy meets Greg for the first time, he wonders what on earth Kim sees in him. Tough guy Brian comes over uninvited, and begs Kim to take him back. After she asks him to leave, he plans to beat Greg up, but Jimmy gets him to hold off on his plan of action by saying he'll get rid of the new boyfriend in his own way. So Jimmy takes Greg to a diner, where he learns that Kim is his first, and tries unsuccessfully to scare him off by lying to him ab