Thoughts before reading:
This is a terrible picture, I know, but the original cover is hard to come by. The newer cover does look a lot better, but this is how the book was released, and it's also the cover I have.
This is another one I've never read before, and I can't say it sounds very interesting either. I feel like I'm in a pretty blah chunk of books right now, both plot-wise and with how familiar they are to me. Most of the ones I grew up reading must have been later in the series, but I'm still finding it surprising how few of these I actually have read before.
The basics:
One afternoon while babysitting, Kristy sees an ad in the paper for the Stoneybrook Baby Parade. She starts thinking about how cute Emily Michelle is, and how much fun it would be to enter her. The parade is still on her mind a few days later, when Mrs. Prezzioso calls the BSC requesting a regular sitter for the next month. Since she has Andrea, the new baby, also needing watching, she wants whoever takes the job to complete an infant care class first. (Actually a great idea, I'm surprised more clients with infants haven't asked for this before leaving their babies with 13 year old kids...) Kristy takes the job, and is excited about taking the class. The whole BSC ends up signing up, realizing this is a great thing for them to expand their childcare skills.
The class turns out to be challenging, but fun, and Kristy's delighted to meet so many potential clients. At the end of the class, she's one of only 2 people to get a perfect score on the evaluation. Since everyone else besides the BSC are adults, this is even more impressive. Now that she's finished the course, she begins her job with the Prezziosos. Mrs. P asks her to help her enter Andrea in the baby parade too. When Kristy mentions this to the rest of the club, they have the idea to gather a bunch of babies for the float division. After some bickering and teasing, they come up with the idea to use the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe as their float theme.
Things don't go smoothly from there, though. Instead the girls end up constantly arguing over how the float and costumes should look. They hardly agree on anything, and are critical of each other's ideas instead of working together. Mrs. P, on the other hand, has her idea to deck Andrea up like a queen all worked out. She even has Kristy make her stroller up to look like a coach.
The parade ends up being a complete disaster for the BSC. Their float is embarrassing enough that people laugh at it, and Charlie gets teased for pulling it for them. The costumes came out looking more like clown suits than anything else. A lot of the other floats are really well done and fancy, which of course makes them feel worse. Kristy's mortified, but realizes the reason the float became a disaster was because they didn't work together or communicate. She starts making apology calls to the other girls right away. Everyone realizes they were much more embarrassed than mad, and they quickly make up.
Mrs. P wins first place in the stroller division. The club also gains two new clients from the infant care class, the Salems and the Golds.
Timeline:
It's not winter, but that's about all I got out of this.
My thoughts:
This was mostly babysitting, which makes for a VERY average BSC book for me because those are my least favorite kind. I know the series is about babysitting, obviously, but that can't be all that's going on. It's just too weird and unrealistic for these girls to be that into childcare, especially when it comes at the detriment of something else (family, school, boys, friends, even fun). That being said, I would have rated this book lower than I did if not for the ending. What really saved this whole story for me was the fact that the girls failed. I really liked seeing their project become an utter disaster, simply because that never happens. Every time they plan or do anything, no matter how ambitious, it's been a smashing success. This is so much better, and more realistic. Not to mention, it's just more useful. Not everything in life is going to be a success, and reading about something like this will help young readers realize failure happens to everyone. At the risk of sounding like an after school special myself, that's the only way to learn, grow, and do better next time. In this case, it even taught teamwork. Plus, a disaster is just more interesting. I was all set to read another big, cheesy BSC event success story.
This book did a few other things really well too. I loved the idea of an infant care class, and I was surprised it never came up before now. Mrs. P is usually portrayed as being ridiculous, but her idea about the class was one of the most sensible things I've heard yet from any BSC client. I also liked that Kristy was nervous about taking care of Andrea. That's really how it would be in a situation like this, even if it was displaced this late in the series. By now she's taken care of Lucy Newton and Laura Perkins quite a bit, and Andrea isn't a newborn anymore. Another plus was the girls acting their ages in here. I know as time goes on, that will get more and more rare. In here, they were really childish with their bickering about the parade, but I could really picture that being how something like this would really play out. Plus, they just aren't going to agree all of the time.
Misc:
*It was hard to imagine teenage girls being so into a baby parade though, even these girls.
*Ghostwritten by Ellen Miles
*Logan and Shannon attended the infant class graduation? It's kind of hard to picture why they would bother...
*Jenny P is dressing more like a normal kid now.
*I'm very confused about why the girls allowed Claudia to make the signs for the float. They all have to read her notebook entries, so they know she's barely literate. Everything on their sign was spelled wrong, and she even managed to spell woman wrong twice, in two different ways.
*I felt bad for Charlie, pulling the float in the parade and getting teased by other high school kids! He really is the best brother of all time. We don't get nearly enough of him in these books, but he seems like such a nice, easy-going guy.
*I'm very curious if we'll ever hear about these new clients again?
Books mentioned:
*Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown
My rating:
3 stars. Not much going on in here, but worth a read for something a tiny bit different.
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