I have to admit that my secret obsession is a little childish. And by childish, I certainly mean awesome.

I am a proud member of “The Baby-sitters Club”. No, this is not a group of CHS students and I couldn’t tell you what days we meet. It’s a children’s book series.
Perhaps some of you (especially those of you who couldn’t read during the majority of the 90s) may not remember “The Baby-sitters Club” book series. Written by Ann M. Martin, the series was published by Scholastic Inc. between 1986 and 2000. It has met colossal success, having sold over 175 million copies.
There have been 131 “The Baby-sitters Club” novels published, with 12 Super Special novels, 40 BSC “Mysteries”, and 14 “BSC Friends Forever” novels. There is also an additional series focusing on one of the member’s younger stepsister called “Baby-sitters Little Sister”, of which there are 83 novels.
BSC follows a group of middle school girls living in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. They form a club based on their shared interest in baby-sitting and decided to run a business that helps parents find baby-sitters from the club. Each novel (other than the Super-Specials or Mysteries) follows a plot line focused on one of the girls.
I don’t pretend to be accomplished enough to have read every BSC novel, but I am still an avid fan. I began my obsession in second grade when my parents bought me a subscription to the Baby-sitter’s Club “Little Sister” novel club from my school’s Scholastic book sale.
For a couple years afterwards I would receive four “Little Sister” books a month, to my utter delight. I would gobble them down and impatiently wait for the next month’s delivery. I savored my hours following the adventures of Karen Brewer and her two families (her parents were divorced), her best friends Nancy and Hannie, and her multiple pets (one of which was a goldfish named Crystal Light the Second, as the original Crystal Light had perished in a previous volume). Karen’s struggles with spelling bees, birthday parties, frightening neighbors, and disastrous haircuts filled me with a sense of wonder. Life was always entertaining for Karen, and I soon viewed life as a sea of beautifully simplistic possibilities.
After I had finished all 83 “Little Sister” novels in a later year, I embarked upon an epic quest to gather all of the “Baby-Sitter’s Club” novels I could. I was older, so I knew that I would appreciate the tales of older girls and their middle school dilemmas. However, considering this series was published many years before the “Little Sister” spin-off series, I had a grueling task at hand.
The tales of the BSC members were very different from Karen’s adventures. The members themselves defined the maturity of the novel – they had different backgrounds, opinions, and outlooks on life. These girls came together in the BSC to form a sort of melting pot out of their shared love of babysitting. The stories explored more mature themes, such as challenges with schoolwork and their many babysitting clients, friendships, divorce, and the general process of leaving early adolescence behind.
My dad was able to find the first novel, “Kristy’s Great Idea”, at our nearest Barnes and Noble bookstore. I remember having to clean my messy room before he would let me read it – torture on its highest level.
However, I was dismayed to find that the series was no longer in print, and the major bookstores only carried the first novel, if at all. So, my dad and I pored through our nearby Goodwill and another locally-owned used children’s clothing store to piece together the series. This is proven to be an optimum system at the beginning of the series, and I was able to follow the novels in a logical, sequential manner. However, once I delved into the higher numbers of BSC, I encountered much more difficulty. I would have to skip a couple volumes here and there that I could not find. I would miss certain elements of the plots. Why did Mary Anne and Logan break up? Did Dawn move back to California permanently? When did Stacy’s parents divorce? These are all questions that I frustratingly attempted to answer for myself, searching for clues by delving into previous novels but finding nothing.
I sometimes wish I could have considered looking on E-bay for my lost treasures, but I now understand that this pondering and fruitless searching has molded me into the person I am today. I ask myself questions when I analyze a literary text, I think critically about life’s events in an introverted manner, and I’ve learned to adopt certain qualities while caring for children such as patience and the general appreciation for the simpler things in life.
“The Baby-Sitters Club” has shaped me as a person, both as a student and baby-sitter. One of my prime achievements through my obsession was seeing my two sisters lug out the boxes of “Little Sister” books from our storage area and pore through them just as I once did. I hope that they also adopt the same fascination and wonder for the world that I have today.