Kristy And The Baby Parade (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
ugh. a baby-heavy kristy book. what could be worse? there is a shit ton of babysitting in this one. it opens with kristy at home, sitting for david michael & emily michelle. what the hell is up with the thomas/brewer clan & their obsession with middle name inclusion? the kids are bored & kristy suggests they make collages out of old newspapers & magazines. she idly reads the paper while they work, as 13-year-olds are wont to do. she stumbles across an announcement about the biannual stoneybrook baby parade. children under three are permitted to enter. there will be separate judging categories for floats, decorated strollers, & wagons/go-karts. go-karts? that does not seem safe. nor does it seem safe to put a baby on a float. nor does it seem probable that the babies would be all that visible on a float. floats are big, babies are small. anyway, kristy starts daydreaming about how cute emily michelle would look in the baby parade. poor emily michelle. she's all language delayed & all her family ever does is give her cookies & fuss over how cute she is. i foresee some serious self-esteem issues for her in about ten years, when she's chubby & has developed a complex from associating food with love, no one expects much from her academically, & people just want her to be a cute little asian girl.anyway. before kristy can really follow-through on the emily michelle/baby parade idea, she gets a regular gig sitting for the prezziosos while mrs. prezzioso does some project for jenny's pre-school. the only hitch is that mrs. prezzioso wants her sitter to take a baby class "now that andrea is older & more active." because sitting for a newborn is a cinch. you don't really need infant-specific skills until the kid can hold its own head up, amirite?kristy is pumped for the class, & all the other sitters decide to sign up too. claudia says they can advertise themselves as "infant specialists" once they have all graduated. kristy acknowledges that this is a "great idea" & "tries not to be jealous." kristy has issues.there's this really weird side plot in which all the babysitters get crushes on the teacher's husband, don. even kristy, who isn't usually into having crushes. there is never any explanation for the crush, aside from the fact that "don is very handsome." he is never really shown doing anything especially noteworthy or interesting. & the crushes all disappear without much fanfare when the sitters meet his son. kristy realizes that don is just another father who might call them to babysit one day. o...kay? i have seriously expended more energy writing about this plotline in this synopsis than is spent on it in the book, which makes me wonder why it was included at all. it went nowhere & seemed to illustrate no point. maybe it was ann's PSA encouraging new babysitters not to crush on their charges' fathers? anyway. the sitters learn a lot in their class, but only two class members receive perfect scores. they are kristy & one of the expectant fathers. everyone is really shocked that it was a dude who did so well. i am kind of distressed & disturbed that they are so surprised. even in the world of the BSC, child care is first & foremost a woman's job. i am also weirded out by the idea of a "final exam" & announcing scores. i feel like becoming a parent is enough of a transition without taking a test that may indicate that you don't know what the fuck you're doing.so kristy is ready for her job with the prezziosos. right off the bat, mrs. prezzioso goes nuts with her plans to enter andrea into the baby parade, & basically drafts kristy into helping. kristy is reluctant because it will eat up time & energy she'd rather spend preparing emily michelle for the parade, but she seems to be convinced that mrs. prezzioso will unceremoniously fire her if she doesn't help. this makes no sense, but it forwards the plot, so...then kristy realizes that maybe all the club can help make one big float with multiple babies on it, & emily michelle can be one of the babies. the other sitters love this idea. they all have babies they want to enter. kristy can enter emily michelle, claudia is hung up on lucy newton, mary anne wants to enter laura perkins, dawn focuses on eleanor marshall, jessi of course wants to enter squirt, & the girls contact some of the new parents they met at their baby class to recruit more babies for their terrible plan. they decide their float theme is "there was an old woman who lived in a shoe". claudia will make a big papier mache shoe, one of the sitters will dress up like the old woman, & all the other sitters will ride the float dressed as older children & help wrangle the babies. charlie will pull the float. because riding on a float behind the exhaust-spewing junk bucket is safe for babies.the problem is that, mysteriously, apropros of nothing, considering all the group projects these girls have done over the years, none of them really communicates with the others about their personal contributions to the float. kristy envisions the babies peeking out of the shoe (which is an awful idea--the babies will be hard enough to see without being encased inside an enormous shoe), but claudia just makes a big shoe as a centerpiece, for the babies to sit around. stacey mixes up some orange-brown paint for the shoe, which clashes terribly with the bright pink fabric mallory buys for the baby costumes. the costumes also feature an awful ruffle down the front & look like clown outfits. dawn, kristy, jessi, & mary anne notice all these problems right away, but for some reason, they choose not to say anything, not wanting to make the other girls feel bad. much better to wait until the project is too late to save & THEN make them feel bad, right? seriously, this makes no sense. they can see the main float organizers having a breakdown of communication & they just sit there & watch. rather than suggesting that stacey & mallory talk color while stacey is still mixing paint & still has time to change colors, they do nothing. rather than offer some constructive critique of mallory's costume design, dawn just chooses a different outfit for eleanor to wear. rather than offering to help claudia with the shoe, they just watch her make something ugly. & of course, the float is terrible, no one is happy, & everyone argues. dawn has an awesome line when one of the babies starts crying in her costume. she says, "maybe she's crying because her costume is so ugly." hahaha!kristy is also depressed because she's finding it much more difficult to take care of a baby when she also has a four-year-old to watch. she seems chronically unable to remember to burp andrea after feeding her, so andrea throws up everywhere on like every single sitting job. mrs. prezzioso has decided to dress andrea as a queen & asks kristy to make her stroller into something that resembles a royal carriage. naturally, kristy dresses andrea up in her costume & andrea pukes on it. nice work. kristy makes the carriage (which seems like way too huge & important of a job to delegate to the 13-year-old babysitter with two children to watch--why not hire kristy to watch the kids while mrs. prezzioso makes the carriage? or enlist mr. prezzioso is this challenge?) & she thinks it looks terrible. mrs. prezzioso is consumed with the idea of andrea winning first place in the stroller division & kristy fatalistically concludes that it won't happen. she also convinces herself that mrs. prezzioso will fire her if andrea doesn't win. what?parade day! the float looks awful, none of the babysitters are wearing costumes or even vaguely matching clothing, there are gazillions of babies to watch, charlie is so embarrassed to be seen pulling the float that he actually wears a disguise, & none of the sitters are talking to each other. the float is hands down the worst in the parade. & yet, there is a moment at judging when kristy wonders if maybe they scraped third place. they did not. but queen andrea wins first place in the stroller division, despite kristy's dire predictions. this seems uncharacteristic. isn't kristy usually insanely over-confident? the book ends with kristy dispatching charlie to pull the float to the dump & make sure it gets compacted. he does so & confesses at dinner that it was really satisfying to see it gets destroyed. i think this is definitely one of the weirder BSC books. kind of "twin peaks" vibe, if you stop & think about it.
At the behest of Mrs. Prezzioso, all of the baby-sitters take an infant care class at the community center. So that’s one part of the book. Then Kristy takes a long-term job with Mrs. Prezzioso, helping her get Andrea ready to be in the biennial Stoneybrook Baby Parade. The BSC decides it should be a part of the parade, too, but they go about their planning sort of half-assed. Nobody consults with anyone else or works together, and they end up with a bad float. I sort of like the idea of BSC book where, for once, something they plan to do doesn’t come off. It's unclear in the book why this particular project falls through--nobody's communicating, but it's not explained why. They're not fighting or anything. Still, I do think this is the sort of thing where they would fail, since nobody is really counting on them, and it’s not for a good cause except club publicity, so they don’t so much want to do it as they feel they should want to do it. But it's a dead boring book. Like the BSC, I can’t get even a little jazzed about the idea of a Baby Parade.Author gratefully acknowledges: Ellen MilesCreep Factor: What is with the weird part where all of the baby-sitters are in total love with the husband of the couple who teaches the class? Even Kristy.Continuity Error: "What's 'colicky'?" asks Jessi in the infant care class. That line should have been given to ANYONE else. Squirt was colicky, per The Baby-Sitters Remember. Quibble: The baby-sitters have just a ton of people at their infant care class graduation. It was a four-week community center class, you guys. You're getting a certificate. It's not that big a deal. Even Logan comes, and he and Mary Anne aren't even dating at this point. He breaks what appears from book #46 to be a five-book, approximately five-month silence to come to her dumb community center class graduation. And this aberration is never mentioned anywhere else. I'm starting to feel like maybe the Baby-sitters Club series is turning into a Baby Parade situation with none of the ghostwriters talking to any of the others. Timing: Seems like summer. Parade weather. I can’t find a reference to school, and the girls have time for all this nonsense. The only specific temporal marker is Kristy thinking when Jamie mentions his Halloween costume that Halloween is "about three million months away," which I guess means about three.Revised Timeline: This is where I figure out how old the baby-sitters would be if they aged. Summer between tenth and eleventh grades.
What do You think about Kristy And The Baby Parade (1991)?
This is a bit of an odd one. Kristy finally has a Big Idea that turns out horribly although it's never fully explained why, though it was bound to happen. It's a given that when a BSC member suggests that the club enter a bunch of their charges in the baby parade, everyone else will agree it's a good idea.If you're thinking there aren't that many kids under three in BSC-land at this point, you'd be right. Luckily the girls sign up for a class on newborn care at the request of a client and find a whole new batch of clients. This part is actually interesting and shows that Kristy is fully capable of thinking, and expecting, another club member to have done better at something childcare related.Anyway, for some reason each club member has her own vision for the float and none of them ever seem to talk to one another about it except if they're not actually working on the float. It doesn't take long before you realize there's a reason the cover for this book is incredibly ugly. It's actually one of the most true-to-the-book covers ever.You pick now to faithfully recreate a scene? Ugh. Other than teaching kids that it's important to communicate when working on a project, I don't see why the BSC doesn't ever talk about their plans. Usually they overtalk things to death, but for a float they just fall apart? Weird.
—Marian
Fantastic books for young girls getting into reading!! Great stories about friendship and life lessons. The characters deal with all sorts of situations and often find responsible solutions to problems.I loved this series growing up and wanted to start my own babysitting business with friends. Great lessons in entrepreneurship for tweens.The books may be dated with out references to modern technology but the story stands and lessons are still relevant.Awesome books that girls will love! And the series grows with them! Terrific Author!
—April
