Previously in this series.
Your peer group has associate members.
You have something called a Kid Kit filled with toys that you present to children with regularity, but it isn’t creepy.
You hide candy in absurd places in your bedroom, but you do not have an ant problem.
Each of your adventures starts with a recap of who your friends are, what they look like, and their job in your organization.
You and your friends run a weird, complicated, under-the-table small business, but only one of you is “bossy.”
Your parents are divorced or widowed and if they aren’t, you feel left out.
Everyone in your hometown seems totally comfortable leaving their kids in the hands of an 11-year-old.
Your hometown appears on no map.
Your achievement in school, excellent or terrible, seems to have no impact on your available time for part-time work.
You think your friends are really cool and stylish, but you are wrong, because you are in 8th grade.
You take great pleasure in listing every article of clothing you’re wearing, as well as every article of clothing each of your six closest friends are wearing.
Your shyest friend has a dreamy boyfriend with a southern accent. Nobody understands why, including said boyfriend.
You have been in literally every extracurricular activity your school has to offer, but never for longer than two weeks.
You find yourself oddly attracted to the supernatural and situations that could be described as mysterious. On some more memorable locations, you’ve even helped the police solve seemingly inexplicable crimes. And you’re not even in high school yet.
You frequently embark on cross-country and even transatlantic trips that are sponsored by your school. Your middle school.
You had your first fulfilling romantic relationship when you were 13.
You haven’t aged past 13, and you never will.
The only people you know who practice a religion are Jewish or could be loosely described as “New Agey.”
The pre-teens you know who like to read are only into Marguerite Henry, definitely NOT Sweet Valley or Boxcar Children or Harry Potter.
You face off against some older girls in a trivia about neighborhood children contest. You consider your extremely detailed level of knowledge a win.
You’re extremely good at one thing. Just one.
Getting your ears pierced was a transformative experience.
In general, the worst people you know are older siblings and high school students.
You envy your friend who has her own phone line.
Your sense of style could be described in a catchy two-word phrase, or as regional to a specific city or state, or both.
You find yourself involved in short-term but intense romances whenever you leave your hometown, and you never regret any of them.
At least fifty percent of the children you know—and there are many—could be called precocious, and often are.
You spell “love” as “luv” unironically, and everyone around you seems cool with it.
You dot your lowercase “i”s with hearts. This is also not ironic.
Your friend Stacey briefly hangs out with some dirtbag teens, but she gets wise to it.
You think liking horses makes you unique but it actually just makes you 11, and it’s a miracle your older friends aren’t more condescending about it.
Tags: babysitting, bethany keeley-jonker, books, christy admiraal, how to tell what novel you’re in
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All series should have a mandatory second-chapter recap of all the main characters.
This would assist my reading of ASOIAF immeasurably.
“And Tyrion? His mom died when he was born, and because of that, his dad is super overprotective. But that doesn’t stop Tyrion from getting into a little trouble with us now and then!”
This would have helped me so much with Anna Karenina.
You willingly spend time outside of school detailing your babysitting jobs in a notebook, which, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is not an academic requirement and won’t be graded.
I’M SO MAD WE MISSED THAT
I never liked when any of them wrote in cursive. Really, the only ones with acceptable handwriting were Dawn and Abby. (Also Karen, Logan, and Robert in super specials.) (Guys, I have thought about this series so much.)
YES Super Specials were the best because the guys got to babysit/record babysitting experiences as well (first/last time I’ll ever say anything was the best BECAUSE OF men).
Was the one where they all go to summer camp and sneak around a Super Special?
Yeah but in the Super Specials you also hear from fucking Karen Brewster who needs to SHUT UP FOREVER.
I said somewhere else I had a love/hate relationship with her, but it actually falls into the “love-to-hate” category. I used to make my younger sisters listen to me read passages where she was particularly horrible (usually about her poor next-door neighbor or her classmates).
Looking back, the Babysitter’s Little Sister series was clearly my introduction to hate-reading.
<nitpick>Brewer</nitpick>
Oh my lord. How did I DO that?!?!?!?
I have to cop to liking Kristy’s and Stacey’s handwriting best. And indeed I just came across a notebook from third grade wherein I wrote like Stacey for a few assignments. It’s REALLY hard to remember to dot one’s “i”s with hearts!
I briefly tried to make all my s’s (esses? “s”es? How does one pluralize s?) look like Stacey’s because I loved how they looked. The little hearts took too long to write. I was not a patient child.
And you just know that Jessi was sooo proud of her stupid loopy handwriting. Jessi has the handwriting of an uptight 3rd grade teacher
Yeah, but Kristy will give you A Look if you don’t. That’s incentive enough for me.
Your friend has a dead mother, or diabetes, or wears mismatching clothes to be the coolest Asian of the group. Some things will never leave my subconscious.
I was actually terrified of diabetes after reading Stacey’s Big Secret (or whatever it was called).
Full disclosure: I am also one of those children who DARE worked on.
Come and sit next to me.
To this day, every time I’m really thirsty the back of my mind goes “you have diabetes!”
ME TOO!
Me too! Mind, there’s a history of diabetes in my extended family, so it’s not just thirst that sends me little hypochondriac thoughts, but it’s definitely the one that made the most impression. Thanks, Stacey.
Me too!
did Go Ask Alice also scare the hell out of you? I am an eternal square (relative to my liberal arts school friends) thanks to those two things.
Oh, MY GOD, Go Ask Alice. It came up in school, I asked my mom to explain the plot, and yeah, I was done. I am still unlearning “gateway drugs” as a concept.
I spent a lot of my middle school years reading books like Go Ask Alice and Cut and stories about kids being abused (but never A Child Called It because that book is crap). No drugs or drinking or trusting any man ever for me!
I have a feeling “Readers of The Toast” and “People DARE worked on” is a Venn diagram with significant overlap.
Brilliant.
Now all I want for the rest of the weeks is Toastie Venn diagrams.
Ha! I would totally pitch that, if either Venn diagram jokes or I were just slightly more consistently funny.
But what I really want for Christmas is an “Are you a Nicole or a Mallory” Toast Quiz.
okay that you HAVE TO pitch
I have a feeling that “Readers of The Toast” and “Venn Diagram Enthusiasts” would have even more overlap, if that’s possible without becoming a circle.
DARE probably worked on me, but it’s hard to say because literally the first time I was offered drugs I was 23. I did say no though?
Me too!!
DARE ALSO WORKED ON MEEEEEE
omg yessssss!!
side note: i did actually dot my i’s with hearts for a while after reading BSC. thank god it was only a little while.
Sometimes I notice a vestigal tail of “i”s dotted with circles rather than dots in my own handwriting, these things can *stick* (don’t be like me kids)
I did that for a little while too. I think one of my teachers told me to stop.
Didn’t everyone?
(serious question)
I ditched D’Nealian lowercase a’s for Stacey’s as soon as my teachers stopped caring and never went back.
oh jeez, i never knew that’s what they were called! anyway, pretty sure i attempted that, too, but found d’nealian easier, haha.
Those recaps were always my favorite part, and I mean that sincerely. Yes! This is the part where we are reminded that Claudia is terrible at spelling and Kristy is probably wearing a turtleneck!
I only liked them when they had a gimmick attached. Like “If the BSC was a charm bracelet Kristy’s charm would be a baseball bat because blah blah blah.” I wonder how the ghost writers kept coming up with them.
I literally just realised that there must have been ghost writers. What about Goosebumps? Are all the books I enjoyed between 8 and 10 years old a lie?!
I think all the BSC books after Book 20 or 21 were ghost-written.
Even in August, Kristy wore a turtleneck.
I am grateful for the phrase “because it’s illegal to go outside naked” and still refer to it as a guiding light of my fashion sense.
You have been on approximately 16 winter vacations and 21 Super Special adventures, have watched the seasons change, people grow and move on and some forever, and yet are always in eighth grade. You have been in eighth grade for a very long time.
Now I want to redo the entire series a la I Am the Cheese and it’s all in Kristy’s head and she’s 36 and was in a terrible accident at 13.
I support this idea wholeheartedly! It would explain SO MUCH.
Your clothes are all red, white, or black. You have a selection of hair bows that accentuate your perfectly tousled locks.
Isn’t the red/white/black thing from Sleepover Friends (which pales in comparison to BSC, obviously)?
I thought that was Stacey’s mode–her “New York” style was basically black leggings and boxy red-and-white shirts, wasn’t it? Am I conflating things? DRAT
Squiggle pin. Still not 100% sure what it is, but I still kinda want one just because Stacey had one.
I thought about a squiggle pin just last week! What can it be?? Only cool people know.
Also, can we talk about whether it was Stacey who wore the squiggle pin, or was it her fancy NYC friend Lane? And remember how Stacey had to tell all her rube Stoneybrook friends not to open their purse for people on the street? Because I also think about that, every time I DO open my purse to give away change.
Squiggle pins are those very 80s line pins. I cannot figure out how to describe them, but google squiggle pin and you will be ‘oh, those!’ It’s the same 80s squiggle that was used in graphic arts and bad invitations, etc.
(note I am not a cool people, nor have I ever read babysitters club books, so I could be wrong, but I would almost guarantee that’s what they were talking about in the books.)
Praise me for I had a squiggle pen! I’ve been waiting 18 long years to cash in this street cred.
It is! Stephanie Green (fashion icon) was all about the red, black & white. Right down to her clubhouse. I still want that clubhouse and I’m an adult woman who lives alone in her own apartment.
Aw, crap. Never mind, then.
I really wanted my own signature colors just like Stephanie, and I wanted to pick blue, black and white to be different, but I was told I would look like a bruise. 🙁
I was coming here also to mention Sleepover Friends. I have never in my life seen so many people discussing Sleepover Friends. In fact, I was pretty sure I had hallucinated that series.
We would totally be able to face off against older girls in any trivia contest we wanted.
I had started to wonder if I imagine the entire thing too. All I remember though is the descriptions of the food they would make at the sleepovers. My mom was in an intense earth-mother phase with carob and all whole grains at the time, so Sleepover Friends was basically porno to chubby 9 year old me.
I feel like the premise of Sleepover Friends had inherent limitations that the Babysitters Club didn’t have. Not that this stopped me from reading all the Sleepover Friends books that the local library had (enough to permanently cement the red, black, and white thing into my brain) or anything.
Also, ALMOND-SHAPED EYES. Racist? You’ll never know.
Your shyest friend has a dreamy boyfriend with a southern accent. Nobody understands why, including said boyfriend.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/12/09/tell-baby-sitters…
Southern…hemisphere, maybe? Wasn’t Logan Australian? Am I nuts?
Not nuts, just confusing significant others. Mallory’s boyfriend Ben Hobart was.
Speaking of boyfriends who no one understands…
He was from Kentucky. Which is a useful fact that my brain has saved for me for a decade and a half. Thanks brain!
whyyyyyyyyyyyy did I think he was from Australia? My brain has saved the “Logan was from Australia, liked shrimp on the barbie” information for so long!
Wasn’t he Australian in the movie?
Specifically, Louisville, which according to Mary Anne is prononounced “Lou-uh-ville” by those with Kentucky accents! (WHY DO YOU RETAIN THIS, BRAIN?)
Logan was from Kentucky. Mallory’s on/off boyfriend Ben Hobart was from Australia.
Which….why does an ELEVEN YEAR OLD have a boyfriend?
Sorry I keep shouting. I have very strong feelings for the BSC.
The same reason you would pay an 11-year-old good money to watch your small children while you’re not in the house?
Sorry, guys, I know this is an old post, but I came here from the current Goosebumps post, and I just needed to say that as an 11 year-old, I used to have babysitting gigs that left me in charge of my nine year-old sister, her best friend, and her friend’s five year-old sister, sometimes until midnight. Seriously. WTF were our mothers thinking? (Pretty sure it was probably “we’re single moms and this is a super-cheap way to get away from our kids,” but it strikes me as an odd choice considering how over-protective my mom could be otherwise.)
‘Ben Hobart’. HOBART.!? I forgot about that last name. They didn’t even try. And also, his family called her ‘Mell-ry’ which I got really offended about because I didn’t pronounce her name that way and I clearly represent the whole of Australia
I vaguely remember him being from…Kentucky? Or maybe Tennessee?
I cheated and checked Google, and it’s apparently Kentucky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baby-Sitters_Clu…
OMG. Logan. The feels.
I CANNOT HANDLE THESE FEELS RIGHT NOW.
A dreamy boyfriend who looked “just like Cary Grant, her favourite movie star!” Which, 1. was totally contradicted by the rest of his physical description, 2. he is 13 so LOL, 3. Mary Ann you are so intensely weird.
(Confession, Mary Ann was always my favourite and I know this says nothing good about me.)
No, it was Cam Geary! (I mean maybe Cary Grant was mentioned because they only watched old movies.)
Your friend has diabetes. No one except her seems entirely sure what that means or how she deals with it, but everyone speaks of it in hushed tones and sad looks. It’s probably fatal.
They will also continually forget that this means you can’t eat cookies, or cake, or any of the other snacks they brought for your friend meeting thing, except one time when they get you special “diabetic cookies” which taste like baked garbage.
Your parents had 8 children in 6 years, not because they’re religious fanatics of any kind, just your average middle-class couple who can’t figure out birth control even after the second pregnancy resulted in triplets.
This surpasses even Anne Shirley-Blythe’s achievements in child-having, and as we already know, she was a time-traveler.
You sometimes misspell your own name.
Sadly, I do this all of the time. Probably because I don’t actually write it very often anymore.
You and your friends only ever hang out in one room of one friend’s house. You have loosely assigned seating in said room that must be explained regularly.
Your stepfather is a millionaire, which is convenient.
WATSON!
Also: KAREN! I had such a love/hate relationship with that little brat.
Despite having a millionaire for a stepfather and therefore never wanting for money, you insist on devoting all your spare time to your babysitting business, which presumably pays you way below minimum wage because parents who can afford to pay good money for childcare won’t settle for 13-year-old babysitters.
I would like to certify this post as “dibbly fresh” and raise a pizza toast to you both.
Dibbly fresh!!! Oh my god!!
I was at the grocery store the day before thanksgiving THIS YEAR, and I thought to myself that the peppers did not seem dibbly fresh. I am 31 years old. True story.
“You frequently embark on cross-country and even transatlantic trips that are sponsored by your school. Your middle school.”
So lucky. When I was in Middle School, we just got to visit the state capital and, while there, be subjected to a cheesy short film: “How Your California State Government Works!” (My best friend, Ellie, pointed out that we could have watched this back at school and spent that time seeing more of the capital, but I digress).
Anyhoo, since that was Sacramento and we were in SF, some folks might have considered that “cross-country.” I know one of our teachers did. :p
And since I grew up in Cali, I always liked that it seemed like some mythical, faraway place in those books (as I recall). Though to be fair, Connecticut seemed like a mythical, faraway place to me.
You have diabetes, which is glamorous.
You are poor, poor, dirty, poory, stupid poverty-stricken proto-Duggar Mallory ew god Mallory why are you so poor get a real job instead of baby sitting because your dirt poor giant family of poors could use the money.
“You had your first fulfilling romantic relationship when you were 13.”
Oh, man–a close friend of mine and I are always talking about how YA novels ruined our concept of what a normal romantic life is. I don’t think we ever thought BSC was part of the problem but yeah, no, apparently it was. Especially considering this was the friend who told everyone in our first grade class she had diabetes, solely because Stacey was her favorite character…
everyone had that friend. Or… *was* that friend
“You take great pleasure in listing every article of clothing you’re wearing, as well as every article of clothing each of your six closest friends are wearing.”
Anyone remember the highly excellent blog, What Claudia Wore? It’s mostly inactive these days (I think) but worth going through the archives.
Also, 11 does seem really young now, but I started babysitting at 10 and quit by 14 because I actually really dislike kids. (I walked dogs instead, more lucrative and more fun.) 10 was when you could get your Red Cross babysitter certification.
Twofold response!
I loved What Claudia Wore. Literally one of my favorite things on the Internet.
I also took up babysitting when I was either 10 or 11 and continued for nearly a decade. I was substantially more competent by the time I quit the game, but I was at least OK at it as a tween, aside from a few unmitigated disasters.
Re: outfits, there is also http://bsc-covers-revisited.tumblr.com/ and bsccovertocover.livejournal.com, though the LJ one would not load for me so I don’t know if it’s still around and active.
Yeah I was going to say, “To be fair, everyone in my hometown *was* totally comfortable leaving their kids in the hands of an 11-year-old.” I started babysitting my sister for half days when I was 9 for free, then got certified and made money babysitting other people’s kids when I was 10 or 11.
I started babysitting at 10 and continued until I was able to get a job in retail at 16. I didn’t dislike younger kids when I started babysitting but I was VERY OVER the concept of child-having by the time I stopped. Kids are stressful. And sticky.
How old are babysitters now? Like, 20? No one I know uses them.
I am on a facebook group for very reasonable moms, and they spent a lot of time recently debating whether or not it would be okay for a VERY responsible 15 year old to babysit for a few hours after school. This teen’s parents would be in the same building as the child she would be looking after. As someone who started a babysitting service (“Each Peach Pear Plum we’ll look after your little ones!”) at 11, and went on to be a regular sitter for a six-month-old at 15, I was super confused. Babysitters are like 20, and parents are still terrified.
God that is so weird because I cannot for the life of me imagine babysitting at age 20 for the pay I got at age 14.
But then my mother would sometimes leave me alone at home at age 7 because she had swim class and the daycare center was full of pre-schoolers and bored me to tears. She’d take my brother there, and I would happily stay home with a stack of books.
The thing I cannot ever forget is the time Claudia wore a record for a scrunchie. I swear she did this! I tried to figure out the logistics of it for DAYS.
I remember being very angry with the BSC movie because they looked NOTHING like what I’d imagined.
Wow, just realized I still have the theme song to the movie (or mini-series? not sure) stored in my brain.
Say hello to your friends (Babysitters’ Club), say hello to the peeeeople who caaare
Nothing’s better than friends (Babysitters’ Club), cuz you know that your friends are aaaalways there.
Do dooo do do dooo do do do…..
That one was from the show and will never leave my brain even though I only ever saw maybe two episodes. In fact, I think I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t use said theme song for the movie.
(I owned the soundtrack to the movie. It was my first CD. It really is insanely for the best that that song wasn’t anywhere near the film, given how often I listened to that CD.)
But the soundtrack was so good!
My lovely parents bought BSC-addicted me the movie on VHS and I refused to watch it, based on the cover alone. Who were these children?
FIC REC
FIC REC
FIC REC
“Baby-sitters Club The Next Generation #6: Byron and the God of California” and “Baby-sitters Club: The Next Generation Super Special #1: What Happens in Sea City…”
They both have the format and style of the actual books (100% spot-on), but they’re gayer. As far as I’m concerned, they’re canon.
These are my FAVORITE.
Oh my GOSH, I was obsessed with Byron/Jeff for a while wait why am i writing this comment sorry everyone sorry
YES. I read these about a year ago and they’re PERFECT.
Raise your hand if you started your own babysitters’ club!
I did. I’m such a Kristy.
We had to call people because no one was calling us. It lasted two months.
Also I realized I hated babysitting after I was sexually harassed by a fucking nine year old.
We definitely did that. We never got any babysitting jobs because we were 9.
We did! I lasted through one babysitting job at my next door neighbor’s. The kid was an unholy terror of a four-year old, and when I questioned why I, a twelve-year old, was watching her when her sixteen-year old brother was home the ENTIRE TIME, I got the answer ‘Oh, but he’s a boy!’ That was it for me.
I did. TWICE. (I moved when I was 11.) The first one didn’t ever involve any actual babysitting because we were, like, 10. The second one did have about 3 babysitting jobs, where I learned that children are scary and do not actually appreciate anything in your brown paper bag with glitter on it “Kid Kit”.
Yeah, I gave up babysitting pretty quickly because Eww, kids.
Were they really so young? I looked up to those girls SO MUCH. Also, “you envy your friend who has her own phone line.” Yes. Because of these books, I always wanted my own phone line growing up. Oh, the 90s.
I always thought after reading it somewhere that the books make WAY MORE SENSE if you advance everyone’s ages three years, so the older sitters are 16 and the younger ones 14. I mean, in terms of responsibility and relationships and stuff. Everything else is still totally whackadoo. But I suppose not many 16-year-olds are interested in reading novels about babysitting.
I was thinking exactly this last night as I fell asleep! Almost word for word! Now I’m a little freaked out….
TOAST HIVEMIND.
And in much the way the notional fondness for children disappeared after interacting with them
so too did the desire to say words into a phone of my very own evaporate the moment I had to start doing it for Responsible Adult Reasons
or at least by like the third time I had to do it and ended up crying because the person I was talking to was unhelpful
When you make jewelry out of office supplies it looks cool, not mildly demented.
Stacey should have stayed staying with those dirtbags and gotten out of the child-care business. Those brass rings don’t come along every day, my lady!
“You take great pleasure in listing every article of clothing you’re wearing, as well as every article of clothing each of your six closest friends are wearing.”
A shocking amount of these are applicable to the Gossip Girl books as well.
I never really thought of the ants as a problem, per se.
What Claudia Wore was definitely the greatest. I think I desperately wanted to babysit whenever I started reading these books (I was maybe 8?) and 13 sounded SO MATURE to me then.
I spit tea at the first one and have to collect myself before scrolling back up to read the rest.
It never, ever occurs to you to tell an adult about anything that is happening.
Telling adults about your problems is the most boring resolution, though, which is why the better kid storytellers like Disney just kill the parents off early (or even pre-movie!) and make the rest of the adults assholes. Babysitters Club tried to split the difference and make the parents the assholes, which is not as effective.
I totally forgot that anything besides babysitting happens in these books. There are adventures?
There’s a whole series of “mysteries!” But also there’s a lot of messed up stuff that happens in regular books and super specials that I feel like would warrant a check in with a grownup. I can’t think of any super specifically off the top of my head, but I know that there’s one with Dawn and the Braddocks (?) that gets pretty out of hand and the one with Mary Anne and the old lady that teaches her sewing could definitely have used some adult advice. Plus the one where they’re getting mystery phone calls (it’s like regular series #2 or something).
OH! And how could I forget Stacey keeping her messed up health stuff a secret from her family and finally talking to Dr. Johannsen about it before she talked to her parents!
I think I might be such a nerd that I didn’t even care about what was happening. All my memories of the BSC are just wanting so badly to *be* them. Any one of them, really.
At 13 years old, you are the coach of a local children’s softball team. You have a will-they-or-won’t-they love/hate relationship with the coach of the rival children’s softball team, who is also 13.
Important: to celebrate the publication of this piece, Bethany got me a copy of Kristy and the Walking Disaster at a thrift shop, along with the novel I’m named after, Catherine Marshall’s Christy.
But really Logan whatever his last name was my entire life as a preteen, even if Southern Accent, to me, meant Foghorn Leghorn.
Bruno! Logan Bruno! He’s the #1 association that I have with Kentucky, to this day.
Despite growing up in NYC/Connecticut, you have never heard of sunburn. And you are baffled as to why your skin turns red after sitting in the sun at the beach for an entire day without sunscreen.
I swear to god I still think of that every time I get sunburned. Press your skin and see if it goes from white to red, OMG, sunburn OH NO!
I love this more than words. I have been waiting FOREVER.
One of my best friends, whose name is Mary Ann, all but legally changed her name to Mary AnnE as an enthusiastic BSC-fan in middle school. She didn’t lose the E until college. I find this so endearing.
I dunno about you guys but I could still imitate all seven members’ handwritings RIGHT NOW if asked.
Your phone number, and all the numbers of your friends, start with KL5. That translates to 555, but with letters for some reason, even though it’s the 80s and no one uses letters in phone numbers except businesses trying to make their phone number into a word.
I had all the Little Sister series, and yeah, she’s pretty insufferable.
I read those until I was in 5th grade. They are about a second-grader. I live with this shame every day.
Ditto. I think this was my first experience of intentional hate-reading. I specifically remember how that kid’s parents had to tiptoe around revealing upsetting information to her – information like the fact that the rich-person boat upon which they eat their rich-person lunch on vacation isn’t going anywhere more exciting that fucking Disney World (which most people are not rich enough to visit at all, so).
You are a teenager. Turtlenecks under crewneck sweatshirts are still cool by you.
Oh man oh man, I babysat like TWICE (it is not fun, it is terrible) and I brought a box of toys and such because of these books, oh the retroactive embarrassment!
Also I wished to have diabetes (cool/skinny)
I brought my own version of a KidKit on babysitting jobs too! It mostly meant that I got bored really quickly, since I was playing with the same toys with all the kids I babysat, so it probably made me a worse babysitter in the end.
I was going to recommend some do “How To Tell If You’re In a California Diaries Book,” but then realized nothing would outpace the actual titles:
Dawn: Friends. Changes. Together. Alone.
Sunny: Living. Dying. crashing
Maggie: Perfect. Always. Pressure.
Oh my godddd. I loved those. I thought Sunny was so edgy. And Ducky was so perfect
You are from California, so obviously you eat nothing but sprouts and tofu.
You are also blond because duh, that is the only possible hair color in the state.
Was I the only one who always skipped Chapter 2 and tried to impress people with how quickly I was reading?
I ALWAYS skipped chapter 2.
You think a neighborhood parent is mad at you and your friends because she hasn’t called for a babysitter in almost a week.
That parent turns out to be crazy-racist or hiding something (a divorce is imminent! a child has a learning disability!)
This may be the appropriate time to share that when I first happened upon the Toast and saw the name ‘Mallory’ on the masthead, I immediately pictured Mallory and Nicole as 12 year olds having business meetings in Claudia Kishi’s bedroom.
BSC & the American Girl Series gave me such a complex bc the African American characters SUCKED but I felt compelled to support them. I STILL identify most with Kristy / Stacy and want a Felicity or Samantha doll.
I couldn’t help comparing the problems the characters had to one another, and could never take Samantha seriously. I’d be reading her book thinking, “girl, you are whiny and have no real problems. Addy escaped freaking slavery, that girl is brave and have been through some messed-up shit. Nellie even is dealing with real stuff, you, Samantha need to just calm down and take some laudanum or something.”
LOL @ laudanum! I srly just wanted Samantha’s canopy bed. The only accessories Addy came w was a rag doll and a broken ice cream maker (bc her father was kicked out of the shop!) Im also still traumatized when the overseer made her EAT WORMS.
Samantha had the BEST furniture. Did you want the desk? I wanted the desk. (That said, Addy’s clothes were always really nice.)
oh my gosh how do I not remember the worms?? That’s horrible! I should reread those books over the holidays.
okay now I really wish I had my old BSC books because NOSTALGIA IS HITTING ME HARD, MAN
My mom kept all my books, and every time I go to my parents’ house I have to resist the urge to just sit down with a big pile of them and take a trip down memory lane.
*~ c a l i f o r n i a c a s u a l~*
I wish there was a series that could do for politics what BSC did for entrepreneurship, that is, teach girls that it is mostly a fun game with some in-fighting and then everyone brushes each other’s hair, so you should definitely think about it as a viable career path.
Parks and Rec Junior.
I would read/gift the heck out of a YA series based around debate competitions/ model UN.
When you visit New York, your friend’s dad always takes you to Tavern on the Green and “to see a show.” that’s a *Broadway* show for those in the know. You are the very height of sophistication.
In addition to having a perm – the classiest haircut of them all.
You know (and care) a lot about I Love Lucy.
We did! It was called Busy Bees and we definitely made kits and got hired when we were 11.
You face off against some older girls in a trivia about neighborhood children contest. You consider your extremely detailed level of knowledge a win.
I still know what Jamie Newton’s favourite type of sandwich is. Why do I know this?
is it peanut butter and banana?
Peanut butter and honey, toasted. (Why, brain?)
“Getting your ears pierced was a transformative experience.”
I swear to god, I felt like this happened every three books. Guaranteed in any installment focused on summer camp or sleepovers, in which it would involve the use of a knitting needle, an apple and some ice. How there were not more tetanus-related deaths in this series I will never understand.
Sniff, my mom wouldn’t let me read these books. She said they were about silly girls who like boys and makeup and holding hands. I had to content myself with stories about dogs and horses and pioneers. Even now I feel left out, not able to join in with the Toast fun, just like I couldn’t join in with my school friends who were always talking about these books.
I mean, like, to be fair
You frequently embark on cross-country and even transatlantic trips that are sponsored by your school. Your middle school.
that’s not entirely atypical of That Part of Connecticut, so
lol me too! I’m not even into hearts…I just wanted to be in the BSC sooo much! I think I was 9 at that point.
You are 13 years old. You have a summer job in a department store because apparently child labour laws are just that lax in Connecticut. Your friends, who are a few years older than you and therefore Bad Girls, make you buy them things with your employee discount, then return them without a receipt and get the full price back in cash. This probably works out to an hourly “wage” that is less than what they would make if they got an illegal summer job of their own, but employment is not an option when you are a Bad Girl.
And in much the way the notional fondness for children disappeared after interacting with them
so too did the desire to say words into a phone of my very own evaporate the moment I had to start doing it for Responsible Adult Reasons
or at least by like the third time I had to do it and ended up crying because the person I was talking to was unhelpful
Oh no, at the comic shop the other day, we were talking about common-snack-treats-used-as-nasty-racial-slurs and I told them we had just become a BSC book and they didn’t believe me. BUT IT WAS TRUE.
Oh no, at the comic shop the other day, we were talking about common-snack-treats-used-as-nasty-racial-slurs and I told them we had just become a BSC book and they didn't believe me. BUT IT WAS TRUE.
These books were written at a 4th grade reading level. I remember that very clearly, because my 5th grade teacher wouldn’t let me do book reports on any of them. I also got grounded from reading these once and my mom took away the one I reading (the one where they went to the summer camp). Good thing I had a second copy hidden in my desk drawer!
These books were written at a 4th grade reading level. I remember that very clearly, because my 5th grade teacher wouldn't let me do book reports on any of them. I also got grounded from reading these once and my mom took away the one I reading (the one where they went to the summer camp). Good thing I had a second copy hidden in my desk drawer!
LOL on the candy… Now that I think about it, the BSC may well be where I got the clever idea to stash candy all around my room. And forget about it. Which is how I eventually discovered what an anthill made of chocolate looks like… still not sure how I managed to make myself touch the container to get it DOWNSTAIRS OUTSIDE AWAY NOW NOW. Funnily, though, I did the stashing thing for quite a few years prior to that incident, and I have no reason to think ants had discovered any other stash.