Eric counsels a teen drug addict; Matt's fired from another job; Lucy blows it when she tries to impress the most popular girl in school; Simon and Lucy get lost playing detective.

Annie and Matt are robbed at gunpoint; Mary wants a tattoo; Eric is told to fire the church organist; Simon and Ruthie have the chicken pox; Lucy runs for student-body president (as does Jimmy Moon).

Mary deals with harassment from a boy she turned down for a date; Lucy's new best friend seems to be hiding something; Simon prepares Ruthie for pre-kindergarten.

Eric's no-nonsense father, John ""The Colonel"" (guest star Peter Graves) returns when he learns an array of problems in the Camden household. Mary is jealous of a new member of the basketball team who is getting a lot of the attention. Lucy's declining grades are due to her hanging around with a bad crowd, while Ruthie needs to copy Simon in his quest to be a magician. Meanwhile, Eric is oblivious to all of the family troubles around him as he's preoccupied with writing a sermon that is to be covered by a camera crew. Meanwhile, Annie is doing all the chores at home and at church alone while everyone else is doing their own thing.

Convinced that she'll fail in her basketball comeback, Mary develops a horrible attitude making her quite unpleasant. Eric laments that Mary never talks to him anymore. Lucy is excited over the prospect of her best friend Suzanne coming to visit, until she learns the girl ran away from home. Afraid of his science teacher, Mrs. Hunter, Simon loses his confidence in his ability to complete a class project and feigns illness to avoid it. Also, Ruthie is fearful of her first field trip thinking that she'll get lost from the group.

Simon sees his teacher push a man who was screaming at his son. He then feels guilty when he learns his teacher got fired. Annie takes piano lessons as her ""pregnancy project."" Meanwhile, Matt makes a move on one of his college teachers. It turns out he misunderstood her signals. Mary and her friends skip a boring class and get caught. Also, Lucy forgets her lunch in geometry class and finds her teacher eating it--- two days in a row. She and her friend Shelby then learn a good geometry lesson. Lastly, Ruthie has trouble finding the perfect instrument for music class.