I don’t think I have ever had time go so slow and somehow simultaneously creep up on me as much as I have experienced during this quarantine. After my Tuesday post, I planned to write out some details about the Frozen costumes, and here we are at 8:23 p.m. on Thursday night with no post to speak of! Thankfully, I also recently finished the tenth book in the Baby-Sitter’s Club series, so my next post could focus on the next five books.

We begin with book six, Kristy’s Big Day. This one was my absolute favorite as a kid. It was actually my gateway into the book series, and I think I read it five or six times. And I enjoyed the reread, even with finding everything outcome ridiculous. In this book, Kristy’s mother is getting married to Watson Brewer: and Kristy gets to be a bridesmaid! (Seriously. They say this about forty times. Granted, I am probably being a cynical adult now; when I was thirteen and got to be a junior bridesmaid in my aunt’s wedding, I’m sure I talked about it constantly too!)

The catch with the whole wedding is that is has to happen in just two weeks! The entirety of Kristy’s aunts, uncles and cousins descend upon Stonybrook and the BSC is hired to watch all the kids for the week leading up the wedding. With fourteen children under ten, what could go wrong? If you guessed just about everything, you’d be right!

Truthfully, in true BSC fashion, the problems are not tragic and they are solved within the chapter, and all is well at the end.

In an effort to track the timing of the books, this one takes place right at the beginning of the summer.

Book seven, Claudia and Mean Janine, is another example of a misnomer. Yes, the book is about Claudia not getting along with her sister, although Janine is not particularly mean. Pretentious, maybe a little awkward and she and Claudia definitely do not understand each other, but Janine does not seem particularly “mean.” Still, it’s a catchy, rhyming title so there’s that.

Unfortunately this is also the chapter where Claudia’s grandmother, Mimi, has a stroke. She recovers (mostly) throughout the course of the book and it is this even that brings Claudia and her sister together.

Timeline wise, this takes place during July, right after the wedding and leading us into August and book eight.

I was excited to get to book eight, Boy-Crazy Stacey, because it meant the first visit to Sea City! The BSC heads to Sea City more than one over the course of the series, and I have a very distinct image of it in my head after rereading that it looks like Cape May. It says in the book that’s in on the Jersey Shore so that could mean any number of places. And while the house the Pikes stay in sounds like a Cape May house, the boardwalk experience sounds more like Wildwood.

In any case, in the books, Mary Anne and Stacey travel as mother’s helpers with the Pike family for their two week vacation on the beach. While Mary Anne spends her time with the children, Stacey has her eye on the much older lifeguard. Seriously, she’s THIRTEEN and he’s EIGHTEEN. I think even as a kid reading it I thought this sounded really inappropriate. Of course, I was also a late bloomer in the interest in boys department so it’s also possible I just thought Stacey was being gross either way.

The Ghost at Dawn’s House takes us back to Stoneybrook for the end of the summer. Dawn is convinced her house, which is very old, has a secret passageway. When she finally stumbles upon it, she then believes her house to be haunted. She finds things in the passage which get mysteriously moved around or added.

What drove me crazy was, the mystery in this book only gets half solved! Yes, Dawn figures out who’s really been in the passage but never solves the mystery of the strange sounds she hears at night! (Okay, so she simply acknowledges that she has ghost, but I feel like there’s more to this; am I remembering correctly that they revisit it in one of the BSC mysteries later on? Time will tell. I don’t get to those for a while!)

Finally we have Logan Likes Mary Anne, which introduces the character of Logan Bruno, who I did not remember came into the series so soon. However, it was fun to read about the beginning of Mary Anne and Logan’s relationship again. Mary Anne is super awkward throughout the whole book and it makes me wonder why I didn’t see more of Mary Anne in myself when I was younger; she’s clearly my BSC counterpart way more than Dawn ever way (however, my soft spot for Dawn will always be there!). If I recall correctly, somehow Mary Anne’s awkwardness around Logan made it completely different from Stacey being boy-crazy about the lifeguard. (Plus, Logan is the same age as Mary Anne so far less creepy than an 18 year old and 13 year old together.)

Sidebar: this book also introduced Jackie Rodowsky for the first time, who becomes a very familiar client.

So, we have reached book ten and the beginning of eighth grade for our baby-sitters. I happen to know that it takes until around book one hundred and thirty-one, and then a follow-up series, before they graduate from middle school, so it looks like we’re going to have the longest 8th grade school year in the history of time! Going to fun tracing the timeline moving forward.