A Fair Trade Book
Title: Kristy and the
Baby Parade (Baby-Sitters Club #45)
Author: Ann M.Martin
Author’s web page: http://www.scholastic.com/annmartin/
Date: 1991
Publisher: Apple/Scholastic
ISBN: 0-590-43574-4
Length: 137 pages
Quote: “I admit it. I was bored. I hardly ever get bored while
I’m baby-sitting.”
The speaker is Kristy Thomas, founder and president of the
Baby-Sitters Club. Kristy is a millionnaire’s stepdaughter with a whim of iron.
When she gets bored, there’s no telling what may happen. This time, she finds
an advertisement for a “baby parade” for floats on which children under age
three are dragged around in costumes, and starts planning costumes for her
two-year-old adoptive sister.
But of course Kristy’s vision is bigger than that. Before
she can pick a costume the whole BSC are signed up for an “infant-care class”
by a customer. While they’re reviewing the basic rules of infant care, each of
the seven Baby-Sitters and one or more “babies” for whom she sits gets involved
with the idea of entering all of them at once on a motor-towed “float” with the
theme of “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.”
Are international readers familiar with this traditional
verse?
“There was an
old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many
children she didn’t know what to do.”
Many variants exist; usually people seem to remember it as a
four-line poem, although picture-book-length variations have been printed, and
these days the most common ending is probably,
“She gave them
some broth without any bread,
Told them to be
quiet, and sent them to bed.”
Children need to know
that, in crowded situations, even Mommies and Daddies have been known to make
misjudgments…in old books the last line was often printed as “Whipped them all
soundly and sent them to bed,” and I’ve even seen “Put them all outdoors, and
wished they were dead.” The Baby-Sitters are too nice to think that sort of
thoughts, but they do begin to realize that “there could be such a thing as too
many babies” in one place at one time.
Still, they’re the Baby-Sitters Club from the Lost Planet of
Nice where not even having to be thirteen for ten years keeps people from
behaving well, and they behave well. So, for their age, do the babies. Apart
from the vanity of an older teenager who has to be seen towing the “shoe” float
and all those embarrassingly younger kids behind a car, nobody gets hurt.
To preserve what a Baby-Sitters Club story is allowed to
have in the way of suspense, this review will not reveal who wins the prize. It
will, however, mention that jacket artist Hodges Soileau was below his usual
form when illustrating this one; in the actual story, Kristy’s two-year-old
sister does not step on any of the
newborns.
BSC books are Fair Trade Books. Buy them here, for $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, and this web site will send $1 to Ann Martin or a charity of her choice. You could fit half a dozen or more of these paperbacks into a package; six regular BSC books in one package would thus cost $35 via postal money order, for which you'd pay the surcharge directly to the post office, or $36 online, for which we'd pay the surcharge to Paypal.
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