The Babysitters Club

Our dog does the most obnoxious thing in the morning on the weekend when she wants us to get up. First she jumps off the bed and paces around the room, clicking her nails on the hardwood floor while emitting this frenzied whine that just grates on your eardrums and makes her impossible to ignore. If that doesn’t work, she races from one side of the bed to the other, perches her front feet up on the bed, and sticks her cold nose in your face. Now, I know we could have avoided all this from the beginning if we had never allowed her to sleep on our bed, but her overwhelming cuteness just smashes our hearts into little tiny pieces and has long-ago overridden our sensibilities.

Well, Saturday morning was no different, so I finally got up after about 20 minutes of Bella’s infuriating tactics so that Dan could sleep in a little longer. I went downstairs, toasted a bagel, and snuggled on the couch. After flipping channels for a bit I realized there was nothing interesting on, so I checked out the free On Demand movies, and oh did I find a gem - a total blast from the past. The Babysitter’s Club! I had to watch it.

Watching that movie caused all these nostalgic feelings for my childhood to just come flooding back. You know, being a kid was fricken awesome. I remember just devouring those Babysitter Club books, I’d check out like 7 of them at the library and have them all read in a week. I felt like those girls were my best friends:

• Kristy – The president and founder of The Babysitter’s Club, Kristy was also a major tomboy. Her parents were divorced and she lived in a huge house with her mom, her ultra-rich step dad, and his two kids. I didn’t identify as much with Kristy, because I was a major girlie girl, and Kristy couldn’t care less about boys or clothes, preferring to play sports or get dirty somewhere.
• Claudia – She was the Asian artist girl, whose bedroom they used for their weekly meetings, which automatically got her the VP title. Also a major snack-food junkie, Claudia loved wearing funky clothes and crazy jewelry, and had a pretty hard time in school. She also had a grandma Mimi, cause all Asian girls have Grandma Mimi’s.
• Mary Ann – Kristy’s best friend was a super shy, super sweet, braniac, and was the only girl with a steady boyfriend, the dreamboat Logan. Ahhh… Logan. I wanted Logan to be my boyfriend! Mary Ann was kind of aggravating, she was just too shy and too sweet, letting people continually walk all over her. Whatever, I’m pretty sure she also had a cat named Tigger.
• Dawn – Dawn was my all time favorite! She had moved to Stonybrook with her mom, from California, who married Mary Ann’s dad. So the two of them were step-sisters, which I was so jealous of because I always wanted a sister. (Although that did cause some tension between Mary Ann and Kristy...oooh drama!) She was the total flower child, gorgeous long blond hair, ate lots of granola. I soooo wanted to be Dawn.
• Stacey – And if I couldn’t be Dawn, I wanted to be Stacy! Stacy was the city girl from New York, gorgeous, confident, loved shopping, hair, make-up, and boys. Unfortunately Stacey had Diabetes, which is so totally ironic because Claudia and her were best friends, and Claudia eats so much junk food! Heh. I read the Stacy-centric books as much as the Dawn-centric ones.
• Mallory – I hated Mallory, she was just a junior member, she had red frizzy hair and glasses, totally boring, totally geeky, and only like 11 years old, so a total waste of my time.
• Jessi – She was a junior member like Mallory, but definitely not as geeky. She was a cute dancer, and I think I remember some of her books involving the whole race issue, because her family was one of the only African American families in the neighborhood.

Did anyone else just skim the whole first chapter of The Babysitters Club books? I remember them all being a summary of each girl, what the Babysitter’s Club was about, and who did what (you know, like Stacy was the Treasurer). That first chapter always really pissed me off, because as a dedicated reader, I should not have had to read all that crap all over again every time I read a new book. Something tells me Ann M. Martin hated writing that first chapter as much as I hated reading it.

Well, I watched the whole movie, and it was so wonderful and sweet, and it made me want to be a kid again. When Dan came down from our bedroom, with just about 10 minutes left to go on the movie, I thought I did a fine job of hiding the fact that my eyes were a little teary, but I obviously thought wrong, because he brought it up with my parents at dinner that evening and they all had a good laugh at my expense.

So tell me, which girl was your favorite? Everyone must have a favorite! ($10 says Mallory was NO ONE’S favorite!)