Kristy and the Baby Parade Read online

  Jessi and Mallory arrived together and plopped on the floor. Jessi had a magazine with her, and she and Mal were tearing out the perfume ads and rubbing the scented paper on their wrists.

  “I like this one, don’t you?” asked Mal, thrusting her wrist toward me.

  I sniffed and coughed. “Nice,” I said. “It’s kind of … strong, though, isn’t it?”

  “I think it’s really rich-smelling,” said Jessi. “Like what you’d wear if you lived in Beverly Hills or something.”

  By then, Dawn and Mary Anne had arrived, and Claud was busy rummaging around under her pillow. I had a feeling I knew what she was looking for.

  “I thought I’d saved something for the meeting,” she said, pulling out a bag of mini chocolate bars. “Who likes Snickers?” She passed the bag to Jessi and Mal. “And I’ve got something here for the health nuts, too,” she went on, searching under the bed. “Low-salt Triscuits!” She tossed the box to Dawn.

  Just then, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the digital clock had clicked to 5:30. “Order!” I said. Jessi and Mal put away their magazine. The meeting had begun.

  Since it was a Monday, dues were the first order of business. “Cough it up, you guys!” said Stacey happily, passing around the envelope. She just loves to collect that money.

  “How much is in the treasury?” I asked.

  Stacey counted it in a matter of seconds. I don’t know how she does it so fast. “Well,” she answered, “we’ve got enough for a pizza party. But not enough for extra topping. It looks like we spent the pepperoni money on the you-know-what.”

  “The float?” I asked. “You can say it. It’s all in the past, now.”

  “Thank heaven,” said Claud. “What a disaster. You know, I realized something. A big project like that just can’t work without cooperation.”

  “Right,” said Dawn. “A little give-and-take.”

  “Communication!” said Mary Anne.

  “Working together,” added Jessi and Mal.

  “Okay,” I said. “So at least one good thing came out of the baby parade. We learned an important lesson.”

  The phone rang then. It was Mrs. Salem. She needed a sitter for Ricky and Rose. And not too long after that, we got another phone call. It was Mrs. Gold, another mother from our class, wanting to hire us to watch her two-month-old baby.

  “I heard from Mrs. Salem what a wonderful job you did with the babies on your float,” she said to me.

  After we’d set up the jobs, I looked around Claud’s room and smiled at my friends. “I guess that’s three good things that came out of the parade,” I said. “One lesson and two new clients!”

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  I got the idea for Kristy and the Baby Parade from my summers at the New Jersey shore when I was growing up. As you know, Sea City is the beach town that the members of the Baby-sitters Club visit in various books, starting with #8, Boy-Crazy Stacey. It isn’t a real town, but I based it on several towns that I used to visit for summer vacation.

  In one of those towns, every year around the middle of August my family and I would see flyers announcing a baby parade to be held over Labor Day weekend. Any parents who were interested could enter their baby in the parade. The parents dressed up their children, and prizes were awarded for most beautiful baby, best costume, and so forth. My sister and I were too old to be in the parade, but it was a lot of fun to watch. Who knew what a great story idea it would be? You never know where an idea is going to come from.

  Happy reading,

  * * *

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Ellen Miles

  for her help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1991 by Ann M. Martin.

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  First edition, July 1991

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-69038-6