BSC #45: Kristy and the Baby Parade

Tagline: Babies on board!

The Baby-sitters just love little babies. So of course Kristy has the great idea of entering a float in the Stoneybrook Baby Parade.

All the girls have to do is round up a bunch of adorable babies like Squirt and Emily, dress them in costumes, and plop them on a float. Easy, right?

Wrong. The float looks like a big orange blob, the costumes are hideous, and the babies won't stop crying!

S.O.S. - the Baby-sitters' float is about to sink!

This book doesn't have a whole lot of plot to it. Despite it being the title, the Baby Parade isn't even a focus for awhile. The book starts off with Kristy baby-sitting for her siblings and seeing the ad about the Parade in the newspaper. She looks over at her adopted sister, Emily Michelle, and decides the Emily is just super cute and that Kristy should enter her. She doesn't get any further into that idea though.

Instead, we're fast-forwarded to the Club meeting, where the girls' field a phone call from Mrs Prezzioso. Mrs P says that now that Andrea is becoming more roly-poly and active, she wants to start leaving her home with a baby-sitter. The catch? She wants the girls to take an infant care course before they can start sitting for her. The girls all think it's a great idea, and immediately sign up for it at the community centre.

The girls then spend the next four weeks taking this infant care class. It's all pregnant women with their husbands, so it's kinda weird for the girls to be there, but everyone agrees that it never hurts to know more about babies. The girls of course prove their worth, Kristy being one of only two people in the class to get a perfect score. Even though Kristy has been certified as an expert, she's still not too sure if she's ready to handle the real deal.

So it's now a month after the novel began, and Kristy has a regular job sitting for the Prezziosos. She's to sit for two afternoons a week for about a month. It's here where the Baby Parade finally comes up again. Mrs P has decided that she wants to enter Andrea in the individual stroller division, and she wants Kristy's help with it. Kristy isn't sure she'll have time, plus she still wants to enter Emily, and worries it'll be a conflict of interest. At a Club meeting, Kristy brings it up with the other girls, and the other girls get all excited about all the babies they could enter. That's when Kristy gets her brilliant idea: the Club should enter a float, and then that way all the babies could participate. Kristy could even help and still have time to help Mrs P, without feeling conflicted.

Right away, they're hit with snags. The girls can't decide on a float theme! Each girl has a terrible idea, and the rest of the Club tears each idea down. Eventually they decide to do "Old Woman in a Shoe". However, after that, no one really talks to each other. They each go their separate ways. Mallory is in charge of costumes and gets a great deal on some cheap fabric. The problem is, it's bright pink. Which wouldn't be too bad, except that Stacey has decided to mix up an orangey-red colour for the shoe. Claudia is building the shoe out of chicken wire, and is having problems putting it all together. Come the day of the parade, the float is a disaster: it's not very shoe-shaped, Stacey didn't mix enough paint, so not only is it a clashing orangey-red, but it's also very splotchy, and then Mallory has only just been able to make all the costumes on time, but they're hideous and look like clown suits.

Meanwhile, Kristy's got her hands full with Andrea and Jenny P. She's put together a "royal carriage" out of Andrea's stroller, since Mrs P decided that the theme would be "Queen Andrea". However, Jenny is super-jealous and wants to be in the parade herself, even though she's too old. Kristy is stressed, and worried that if Andrea doesn't win, Mrs P will blame her.

The day of the parade doesn't go much better for the Club. The float is a disaster, Kristy is dressed as the old woman and is embarrassed, Charlie Thomas is mortified to be driving the float around, the rest of the girls (who were supposed to be dressed like children) don't match, and the babies are crying. The Club ends up getting mad at each other, and storming off in a huff. At least for Kristy, Mrs P and Andrea win first prize in their division!

Kristy later thinks back on the experience, and realizes that instead of working together, each girl had their own idea of how the parade and float should go, and forged ahead without consulting each other. They all meet up and apologize, citing the parade as a good learning experience.

There really isn't much of a subplot in this one. I suppose Kristy helping Mrs P was supposed to be a subplot, but it really tied in well with the main plot, so yeah.

Random Thoughts:

• I don't remember particularly liking this one. I know I definitely owned it when I was younger, and read it a bunch of times, but yeah. I feel like I was rather indifferent. Doing my read-through now, I definitely was not looking forward to it. Why waste my time with it when I could be reading more interesting ones?? The story in this one was really basic and boring, so I decided to nitpick it and write about the random details.
• Why wouldn't the girls have taken an infant/baby care class before now? Won't Mrs Newton be like, "OH I SEE, I GUESS YOU JUST DIDN'T CARE ABOUT LUCY!"? haha
• I love how the Baby-Parade is only held every two years. It explains why we haven't heard of it before, and why we'll never hear about it again haha
• I also love how Kristy starts off dismissing the Baby Parade as silly and stupid... but then ends up going totally crazy for it. It's like seeing Kristy's character progression from the start of the series to the end, all wrapped up in one paragraph haha
• I love how Dawn's technique for dealing with temper tantrums is to tuck the child into bed and then talk to them quietly until they're calmer. I'd like to see how well that would actually go over. Granted, I could see it working in a few scenarios or with a few children, but I'm seeing it fail far more than succeeding haha
• Nice bit of foreshadowing in this one. Since I didn't particularly read the books in chronological order as a child, I never realized that we're introduced to the Salem twins in this one, who Mary Anne deals with in #52.
• I always find it weird when Kristy notices guys, but I like it. Here, she becomes briefly smitten with the infant class's instructor's partner. Kristy notes how handsome he is, and how she tries not to stare. She even admits that after four weeks of the class, she still had a crush on him. That is, until she meets his kid. Suddenly, he's firmly in the "father" category, and that makes Kristy's crush on him disappear. I'm with you there, Kristy haha
• There's a continuity error here: Jessi doesn't know what "colicky" means, but later on (like, three years later), there's Super Special #11 has an entire chapter with Jessi and how Squirt was a colicky baby.
• Haha I just realized that I'd been skimming past the pages describing the Club members, and for the first time, my attention was called to it: Kristy mentions that it was nice seeing Mary Anne and Logan together again, and I was like, "Whoa, wait, aren't they broken up??" Turns out Kristy had detailed that whole saga during both the description of the members and the Club itself haha Kristy just liked seeing them get along.
• lol there's a chapter with Jessi baby-sitting for her siblings, and she says that Squirt loves Sesame Street, especially "this little guy Elmo, who isn't on very often." Oh how the times have changed haha