And don't forget that sometimes it was the dead of winter and characters would run around outside in sleeveless dresses. Soap opera time, even though it's suppose to coincide with our own, regardless of the show, always has weird parallel-time going on. As Uncle Roger pointed out, children age rapidly but pregnancies can last longer than an elephant's and other such sundry time-passage stuff. It has to do with the story and plots. On I Love Lucy, Little Ricky aged normally for the first years (yes, I know it's not a soap). However, when the Ricardos and Mertzes went to Europe, he was three and in nursery school. When they returned, he was almost six and a first-grader. DS was great at just ignoring the passage of time. When Vicki went to 1795/96, it was 1967. In current time she was gone for just a few minutes but when she popped back it was 1968. The writers didn't face that problem with having Barnabas (and Julia) travelling back to 1897; the plot coincided it day-by-day when it moved from past to present. Parallel time did the same thing. The 1840/41 plot did provide a coinciding problem when Barnabas, Julia and Eliot returned to the present, but some sloppy covering of it by having Elizabeth ask them (paraphrasing): "Where have you been?" tried to keep the monkey-wrench out of the works.
Gerard