SAHM Portrait Collection: Bonnie

My first child refused to nurse.  (Great opening line, huh?)  My mom had sent me my collection of BSC books so I read them while I was pumping.  I was missing a bunch and in my curiosity to know the later plotlines, I stumbled across some grade A snarks.  Soon I was hooked.  I finally thought that I had read enough snarks and that I'm a sarcastic enough person to think I could snark a bit and put it on a blog  I really wanted to look at these books from a parental perspective, because I know a lot of snarkers out there aren't parents and it puts a different spin on things once you are.  I posted my first post and instantly knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up with it, so I asked my other mommy friends (who are also very sarcastic...irony...) if they wanted to help me out.  And so, we have the blog.  Another friend of ours is going to be joining soon; you'll meet Tess in the next snark.
A bit about me.  I'm the youngest of 5 by a lot, so I babysat nieces and nephews when I was a kid. (Sidebar: I'm going to be a great aunt in December and I just turned 30 last week.  YIKES!).  I used to teach; in my experiences, I have taught preschool through 8th grade at some point in time.  Because of my teaching experiences, I decided to stay home when we had children.  So I now stay at home with our girls and there are days where I wish the BSC did exist so that I could go to the grocery store without having to worry about buckling two kids in carseats, unbuckling two kids in carseats, loading two kids into a cart, keeping one kid out of the purse and the other from destroying the aisle displays...you get the idea.

#44 Dawn and the Big Sleepover (or, Dawn and the Lawsuit Just Waiting to Happen)

 Now I get to snark a book I like.  I enjoyed this one as a kid.  I thought it would be cool to have a pen pal, just for the simple reason I like getting mail.  I also thought all the fundraising ideas sounded fun.  Ha!  Fun, fund…don’t give me that look!  Anyway, it is ghostied by Peter Lerangis and is the 3^rd time through 8^th grade for these young ladies.

Before we jump into the fun that is this book, we need to stop for a shout out about the cover.  It is blaze orange (my ’91 copy anyway) and we see Dawn looking like she’s described in the books, for once.  She also appears to be grabbing some girl chest, even though I think she’s supposed to be breaking up a fight…

So we start with Dawn sitting at the Pike’s with Mallory, of course, and the kids are jumping all over, reading their letters from their pen pals.  Who are these pen pals?  Zunis!  Yeah, that’s just how it’s written in the book.  It’s a group of Native Americans in New Mexico and, according to Wikipedia, the tribe actually exists.  Excellent work, Peter Lerengis!  You used a group of people that actually exist!  By the end of the chapter, the kids have decided to send some stuff from Stoneybrook in their next letters….didn’t realize Stoneybrook was big enough to have bumper stickers and decals.

Sensitive Mary Anne looks up at Dawn when she gets home and assumes the worst, but no, Dawn’s just bummed about not having a pen pal.  This must be pretty devastating to Dawn, considering Mary Anne just looks at her and sees that something’s wrong.  Blar de blar, chapter two stuff and suddenly Dawn’s famished and happy again. 

Uh-oh, Mal’s late for Monday’s meeting and Kristy pulls the rack out of the closet.  Discipline must be swift and fierce!  But then Mal comes in and drops a bomb – the Zunis’ school burned down after a gas station explosion.  No kidding, one of my biggest fears after reading this book was being at a gas station when it blew up.  Thank you, Ann and Peter.

Dawn wants to do something to help, calls Mal that night, who is helping comfort crying kids, and pretty much doesn’t do anything helpful to cheer anyone up.  But Dawn starts thinking and decides to have a food and clothing drive.  Mary Anne’s all, “That’s a lot of work – what teacher is going to want to do that?”  Dawn thinks long and hard and decides, “Why not Ms Besser?  She had Jeff in her class two cycles ago and he was an absolute terror before moving back to Cali.  She’ll be really happy to hear from his crazy sister (whom she met in book 14? 15? But they pretend in this book that they haven’t met….oh, continuity errors!).  Amazingly enough the woman does NOT slam the phone down on the crazy girl calling on the weekend and agrees to take up the project.

Dawn tells Kristy (big chance she took, telling her great idea to the queen of great ideas.  It’s like Snow White telling her stepmom how pretty she herself is.) and Kristy calls the club together half an hour earlier for Operation Help.  Of course, the club members are enthusiastic about spending every waking minute helping with the fundraising and they decide there needs to be some kind of reward.  A GIANT SLEEPOVER!  What could be more fun than 100 kids crammed in a smelly gymnasium…to me as a parent, the idea has pedo-bear written all over it.

All 7 girls are excused from morning classes to head over to SES for an assembly (genius Charlotte’s idea!) to announce the plan.  Best quote in the book: “and as an experienced baby-sitter, I knew those kids were not all angels." It took you 13 years to figure that out, did it Dawn?  You didn’t realize it as YOU were sitting in the assembly as a kid?  Anyway, they are met with resounding excitement from the students.  The prizes are especially exciting to them, which may lead to some problems later…

The kids get creative with their fundraising.  The Pikes hold a carnival in the backyard (really Peter….er….Dawn?  You don’t know what a free throw is?  You have a father and a brother, yes?), there is a yard sale that goes horribly awry (kids donate items without asking the ‘rents…oops.  Most of them are pretty generous and just buy their stuff back since it’s for a good cause.), and Haley Braddock dresses up as Madame Leveaux and tells fortunes (Yeah, wow…don’t know what to say about that one).  May I just take a moment to say that I really hate how badly the writers, ghosties especially, murder Claudia’s spelling.  I get she hates school, but really?  She can’t use the correct spelling of the word sale?

After the yard sale disaster, Dawn starts going through the donations and finds really nice stuff, such as a brand new suit and caviar. Yeah, caviar.  More parents become upset that the kids are giving their stuff away without asking, so the girls come up with a permission slip that must be turned in with donations.  I get that a kid or two will get carried away trying to win prizes, so much so that they clear out the house.  It just seems like parents would be involved with this a bit more so that the issue wouldn’t be so widespread.  More like, “Hey, let’s go through everyone’s stuff, maybe buy some groceries for you to drop off” rather than “Good luck, hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Everything finishes on the up and up and it’s time for the big night.  There are the to be expected issues, like the pizza place trying to cancel their large gratis order of pizzas, the CD player not working, homesick kids.  But the night goes pretty well as a whole, the kids love the prizes and apparently they have collected an astronomical amount of money to send to the Zunis, so astronomically high it couldn’t be put into print.

The girls get the kids ready for bed and start tucking them in.  As Dawn’s tucking in a 2^nd grader, he asks, “Is Johnny going to have dinners, too, now?”  Well, rip my heart out with a flipping spoon.  I sat and cried over that one for awhile. 

And before the babysitters hit the hay, Ms. Besser delivers this line: “Do me a favor.  Would you mind staying exactly the same age for a few years until I have a child old enough to be baby-sat for?”  Ahhh, the dramatic irony.  If only Ms. Besser knew this was already Dawn’s third time through 8^th grade.

They wrap up the party the next morning and ship off all of the goods.  They used the “phenomenal” amount of money raised to ship it and what wasn’t used for shipping was sent in a check.  There are many heartfelt letters of thanks ending the book.

It was a nice story, decently done, and with the exception of a few parents with their heads in the clouds, they seemed pretty supportive of the whole thing. 

#3 The Truth About Stacy

Ah, Tory does a Stacy book.  I don’t think I ever really got into Stacy as a kid; I was more of a Kristy girl.  Maybe I was turned off by the “NYC sophistication” that was in every book.  She’s a bit more palatable in the earlier books…that seems to be the mantra with this series.

This book begins with the four girls of the BSC planning what to do when Mrs. Newton has her baby.  Yeah, because, you know, they’re on her speed dial….I think this might have been written before speed dial…anywho, Janine runs into the room and shoves a flier at the girls advertising a new babysitting agency.  The agency has older sitters who can stay out later and lower rates...dun, dun DUN!  Kristy immediately turns the meeting into an emergency meeting. (Which I don’t get – you’re already meeting, why make it an emergency?)  They call the agency pretending to need a sitter just to see how things work and they find not only do they have older sitters, but they have boy sitters as well.

Stacy heads home and we get a synopsis of how she found out about her diabetes. Continuity: This book actually does a really good job depicting type 1 diabetes.  It talks about how Stacy can eat sweets, but she has to eat on a schedule and be very careful.  Later, the writers start saying she can’t eat sweets at all and distorts diabetes a lot.  Her parents found out they couldn’t have any more children just before the diagnosis and suddenly have become over protective, which I can understand.  They’ve also started dragging Stacy to all kinds of different doctors trying to cure the diabetes.  I’m impressed by how many doctors they can find in a pre internet era.  Anyway, they hid the diabetes from friends, including Stacy’s former best friend Lanie Cummings.  The illness drove a wedge between them and by the end of the 6^th grade year, Stacy was pretty friendless.  Mommy Moment:  I think the McGills actually did something smart by moving out of the city and finding a new place for Stacy to start over.  Where they were a little dopey was dragging her from doctor to doctor instead of just getting her diabetes under control and letting her adjust to having a disease.

So on top of competing with the Babysitter’s Agency, Stacy’s parents announce that they’re taking her to another doctor.  She flips, of course, because she’s tired of being sick and hauled around from doctor to doctor, but her parents stand firm. 

The next day there’s another BSC meeting to plan on how to compete with the Agency.  Here is the birth of the kid kit, which is a pretty neat idea.  Then we have offering to do housework, special rates for good clients, lower rates, and asking Janine and Charlie to help out.  The last one trips Claudia’s trigger and she puts her foot down and they end up starting with special deals and kid kits.

Stacy goes to sit for Charlotte Johanssen the next week with her kid kit.  Miss Charlotte is having trouble in school socially, setting up an additional subplot.

Mrs Newton has her baby, a girl named Lucy.  Jamie stays at the Thomas house and they have a big brother party for him.  At the party, he lets slip that Mrs. Newton is going to hire the Agency to take care of Lucy because she’s so little.  Mommy Moment: Honestly, I would want an older sitter for my newborn as well.  I didn’t leave my son with anyone under the age of 20 until he was a year old.

The Agency ramps up the war by recruiting more kids from the middle school, so the BSC fires back.  The girls walk around school wearing sandwich boards recruiting new sitters for the club. Kristy gets two recruits, who “used to be part of the agency, but got sick of Liz and Michelle.”  Common sense moment:  Really girls?  That doesn’t strike you as the least bit suspicious?  Of course, they are assigned BSC jobs and don’t show up for them.  Kristy is crushed (or should I say Krushed) and starts thinking up new ways to advertise.

Meanwhile, Jamie Newton is sad about his new sitters and even shows Stacy a cigarette burn mark on a chair Mommy Moment: Seriously?  I get you’re sleep deprived, Mrs. N, but you couldn’t smell the smoke in your house? Charlotte too continues to be sad and even lashes out at Stacy, since her new sitters don’t really like her; just hang out with her for the money.  Stacy advises her to talk to her parents about not liking her sitters and about being upset at school.  Stacy has also talked to Doc J about the doctor her parents are taking her to.  Stacy’s plan is to go to their doctor and then to go to one of her own choosing.  She’s asked Doc J to help her find a good doctor and make an appointment with him/her.

Stacy then takes charge and calls an emergency meeting of the BSC.  She tells them about Jamie and Charlotte and they decide to encourage the kids to tell their parents what their new sitters have been up to.  This is cemented when they’re heading home and find Jamie Newton wandering around by the road with no hat or coat (it’s December in Connecticut).  The girls actually talk to their parents (GASP!) about what to do and they decide to talk to Mrs. Newton after that one.  They tell her about everything that has been happening and encourage her to talk to Jamie about it.

The next day the BSC take on Liz and Michelle and show them what good babysitters are like.  They just end up ticking them off and nothing is really resolved at that point.

The next day Stacy leaves for NYC and her new doctor.  Guess who they’re staying with?  The Cummings! Dun, dun DUN!  People we never hear from again: The Spencers: Aunt Beverly and Uncle Lou, parents to Jonathan and Kirsten and the McGills: Aunt Carla and Uncle Eric, parents to Cheryl, who is apparently a pain.

The first day with the new doctor is fairly unexciting.  Stacy goes through a bunch of tests, never even sees the doctor.  She and her parents go out after the day is over and she hands them a letter from Doc J announcing she has an appointment with a very good doctor.  Her parents are a bit miffed (as well they should be) but they go along with it and head out to the doctor.  All he really does is tell the McGills to calm down where Stacy is concerned and let her have a little more control over her body.  Ed and Maureen agree and schedule an appointment with Stacy’s regular doc just for a check up before they go home.

That night they go out to the movies with the Cummings’ and Lanie and Stacy are stuck next to each other.  Stacy goes to get a snack (which, might I add, is $1.75 for 1 small popcorn and 1 small soda) and realizes she doesn’t have enough money.  Lanie covers her and suddenly they’re talking again.  Stacy explains what happened, Lanie explains her side and then the movie is over and they are friends again.  YAY!

When Stacy gets home, she finds out the Agency is kaput and gets to sit for Lucy Newton, while Mrs. Newton is at home, but still, it’s a start.  Then she goes home and Lanie calls to talk.  Everything is resolved!  The BSC is safe!  Stacy is happy!  The End!

Best Quote Ever

• “For one thing, I wouldn’t trust them farther than I could throw a truck,” said Claudia.  “They have smart mouths, they sass the teachers, they hate school, they hang around at the mall.  You know, that kind of kid.”   I didn’t realize being a bad kid meant hanging around the mall.  If that were the case, I should have been in juvie by the time I was 11.