Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes features a wide range of secondary characters. These range from Calvin's fellow students at school to monsters and aliens from Calvin's vivid imagination. Calvin's family Watterson has never given Calvin's parents' names "because as far as the strip is concerned, they are important only as Calvin's mom and dad." Like Hobbes, they serve as counterpoints to Calvin's attitude and view of the world. However, Watterson sometimes uses them to explore situations adults can relate to, such as the desire to enjoy leisure time as opposed to the need to work, or bad customer service and frustrations when grocery shopping. Also, occasionally Watterson takes the time to flesh out the two parental characters. One example is a storyline in which the family returns from a wedding to find their house has been broken into and ransacked. For several strips, Calvin and Hobbes fade into the background as Mom and Dad reflect on the impact of the event. Calvin's father is particularly shaken, admitting to his wife, "I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed." Calvin's father is a white-collar office worker, specifically a patent attorney, as Watterson's own father was. An outdoorsman, he enjoys bike rides and camping trips, sometimes in extreme weather, and insists that these activities, like Calvin's chores, "build character". Though his age is never specified, when Calvin offers him a bowl of chocolate cereal, he replies "No thanks, I'm trying to reach middle age." Calvin's mother is a stay-at-home mom who is frequently exasperated by Calvin's antics. Before Calvin's birth, she worked a stressful job filled with aggravation, which Calvin's father claims is the reason she was better prepared to stay at home and raise Calvin. Whether or not he was jesting is debatable. On the rare occasions when she is not reacting to Calvin's misbehavior, she seems to enjoy quiet activities, such as gardening and reading. She is frequently the one forced to curb Calvin's destructive tendencies; in one Sunday strip, she allows Calvin to smoke a cigarette in order to teach him how unpleasant smoking can be. (Watterson has said he regrets the fact that the strip mostly shows her impatient side.) In another strip, she voices a wish that Calvin will one day have a child like himself, so he can