I also saw a cluster of parents with young babies in their arms. They seemed to have a lot to talk about with each other.
“You must be the girls who have the club,” said the red-haired woman. “I’m Anita. I’m glad you decided to take the course — more baby-sitters should, but a lot don’t want to spend the time.”
“I wanted to take it as soon as I heard about it,” said Mary Anne. “My name’s Mary Anne Spier, by the way. And this is my best friend, Kristy Thomas. She’s the president of The Baby-sitters Club.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Mary Anne is usually shy! It must have been Anita’s friendly smile that made her feel comfortable so quickly.
“The other members of our club should be here soon,” I said. “We’re pretty excited about the class. Oh, look!” I pointed to the doorway. A woman had just come in, and she was carrying not one, but two small babies.
“That’s Mrs. Salem,” said Anita. “She had twins a few months ago. Aren’t they darling? Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
“So this class is for new parents and expectant parents?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Anita. “And for anybody else who wants to learn more about taking care of babies.” She led us across the room. “Liz, meet Kristy and Mary Anne,” she said. “Girls, this is Mrs. Salem.”
Mrs. Salem smiled at us. She looked kind of tired. She had set both of the babies on a table, in infant seats. “Hi! I like your T-shirts. Do you really belong to a baby-sitters club?”
I looked down. I’d almost forgotten that we’d decided to wear our club T-shirts to class. “Yes, we do.” I said. “We’ve been in business for awhile now, and we decided that it was time to learn a little more about babies. Your twins are adorable! What are their names?”
“This is Ricky,” she said, folding back a soft yellow blanket from one of the babies’ faces. “He’s the troublemaker. And this,” she said stroking the face of the other one, “is Rose. She’s no angel, either.”
They were both so, so cute. When Mary Anne held her finger out to Ricky, he grabbed onto it with his tiny hand and wouldn’t let go. Mary Anne squealed. “He’s so strong!” she said.
Mrs. Salem laughed. “I know. And Rose has got an even tighter grip!”
“Hi, you guys,” said Stacey, coming up behind us. “Oh, how cute!” She and Claudia bent over the twins, cooing. Dawn appeared a minute later and joined them.
“Okay, people!” said Anita, clapping her hands. “Let’s get started. I’d like everybody to take a seat, and we’ll spend a few minutes getting to know each other.”
Just as we were sitting down in the small circle of chairs at the front of the room, Jessi and Mal arrived. Jessi slipped into the chair next to me. “Are we late?” she whispered.
“No,” I answered. “You’re just in time.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “We got stuck in traffic after my dad picked me up from ballet class. For awhile I thought we weren’t going to make it.”
“Okay,” said Anita, once we were settled. “Let’s just go around the circle and introduce ourselves. I’d like each of you to say your first name and a few words about why you’re here. I’m Anita, and this is my partner, Don,” she said, gesturing to a man sitting next to her.
He was really handsome.
He was wearing glasses, and he was kind of old — not as old as Watson, but maybe the same age as my English teacher, Mr. Fiske. I tried not to stare at him as he smiled at us and said hi.
The first person to speak was a cheerful-looking dark-haired woman. “I’m Sue,” she said. “This is my husband, John.” She pointed to a bearded man sitting next to her. “And I guess it’s pretty obvious why we’re taking this class.” She patted her belly and giggled. “Junior, here, is going to be arriving soon, and we don’t have the slightest idea of how to take care of him. I’ve brought up plenty of puppies, but I have a feeling that’s not quite the same thing.”
Anita smiled. “You’re right. For example, you don’t have to worry about a baby chewing up your best pair of shoes!”
We laughed. If any of us had been feeling shy before, the ice was broken now. The introductions continued. I noticed a lot of interest when we told the group about our club, which made me realize that we were probably meeting a bunch of potential clients. I hadn’t thought of that before. This class was going to be great for the club in more ways than one.
“Welcome all,” said Anita. “Now let’s get down to work.” She turned to the blackboard and wrote out a list of topics we’d be covering in class. “Child Development: Birth to Six Months,” the list began. And then, “What Babies Do … and Don’t Do; Feeding; Diapering; Bathing; Sleep Schedules; and Playtime.”
“This looks like a lot, I know,” said Anita. “But we’ll take it bit by bit, and by the end of the course, you’ll all be baby experts.”
“Diapering is the worst part!” whispered Mary Anne. “I can never figure out how to do it without making a big mess with the powder and everything.”
“It just takes some practice,” I whispered back.
Anita was passing out some pamphlets. “I think you’ll find these helpful,” she said. “They contain lots of good information. Now let’s talk about babies,” she went on. “One of the most important things to remember is that babies are totally dependent on you for their care. But they can’t tell you what they need or want — all they can do is cry, and it’s up to you to figure out what’s wrong.”
As if on cue, Ricky — or maybe it was Rose — began to wail. Loudly. Mrs. Salem picked the baby up and held it. She looked a little embarrassed.
“That’s okay, Liz. Let’s just take this as an example. What do you think the baby wants?”
“It’s Ricky,” said Mrs. Salem. “And that sounds like his ‘I’m hungry’ cry. But there’s only one way to find out for sure.” She pulled a bottle out of the bag by her feet and offered it to Ricky. He turned his head away and kept screaming.
“I guess that wasn’t it,” said Mrs. Salem. “Maybe he’s just restless. Sometimes he likes to be walked around the room. I think he gets tired of looking at the same scenery for too long.” She stood up, still holding him. “Could somebody keep an eye on Rose?” she asked.
“I’ll watch her,” I said.
Mrs. Salem started walking, jiggling Ricky a little with each step, and talking to him in a soothing voice. But it didn’t take too many laps around the room for all of us to figure out that a change of scene wasn’t going to be the answer. Ricky just kept on yelling his head off.
“I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Salem. Now she looked really embarrassed. She jiggled Ricky some more, and said, “Come on, buddy. What’s the matter? It’s okay,” in a soft voice.
He wouldn’t stop crying.
“Don’t worry, Liz — we’ll just make a lesson out of this,” said Anita, smiling. “What else might Ricky want? Does anybody have any ideas?”
“Maybe he want a favorite toy to play with,” said one of the pregnant women.
“Well,” said Anita, “that’s a possibility. But he’s so young it’s not likely that he’s attached to any one toy. Right now, he’s mainly interested in being held, and in eating — basic things like that. Anybody else?”
Ricky was still sobbing.
“I can’t take it!” I heard Claud whisper to Stacey. “How much longer do you think he’ll cry?”
Stacey giggled. “I never knew that such a little thing could make so much noise,” she whispered back.
“He’s not colicky, is he?” asked Don, who had stood up and walked over to where Mrs. Salem was standing.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Salem. “I can’t imagine how I would cope if he was.”
“What’s ‘colicky’?” asked Jessi.
“That’s when babies have trouble with their digestion, and they get terrible stomachaches,” said Don. “Nobody really knows why it happens to some babies, but when it does, they can cry for three or four hours at a time.”
“Oh, my lord!” said Claudia.
“But what can you do when they’re like that?” asked Dawn.
“Not much,” said Don. “It can be really hard on the parents. All they can do is walk the baby around and try to comfort it.”
I hope I never have to sit for a baby with colic.
All this time, Ricky had still been screaming his head off. Suddenly, I had an idea. I caught Anita’s eye and said, “Do you think he needs a clean diaper?”
“Good idea, Kristy,” she said. “What do you think, Liz?”
“That could be it,” said Mrs. Salem. “He tends to be really bothered by a wet diaper. Rose doesn’t seem to care.”
“Let’s try it,” said Anita. She brought Mrs. Salem’s diaper bag over to the changing table that had been set up in the front of the room. Mrs. Salem put Ricky down on the table, and his screams grew even louder. Everybody gathered around to watch. Luckily, I was close enough to see well and still be able to keep an eye on Rose.
“Oh, you use cloth diapers,” said Anita. “Great. We need to learn how to put on both kinds, disposable and cloth. So many parents are switching to cloth these days. They are much better for the environment, if you’re willing to do just a little more work.”
Anita changed Ricky’s diaper, talking the whole time about what she was doing. And by the time he was clean and dry, his sobs had died down and he was happily blowing bubbles and making gurgling noises.
I could see that this class was going to be a challenge — and a lot of fun.
“This is our son, Ethan,” said Anita. She put her arm around a little boy with strawberry-blond hair. He was wearing a T-shirt with a big purple dinosaur on it.
“Hi, Ethan,” I said. “I like your shirt!”
“Say hello to Kristy, Ethan,” said Don.
But Ethan was feeling a little bit shy. He rubbed one of his sneakered toes against the other and pressed his face into Don’s leg.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Sometimes I feel shy, too.” What a cute kid! I’d gotten used to the idea that Anita and Don were married — that had become clear by the end of the first class. After four weeks, I still had kind of a crush on Don; so did Stacey and Dawn — in fact, I think all of us BSC members thought he was pretty terrific.
But I hadn’t met Ethan before, so this was something new. All at once I saw Don in a different light: He was just another father, someone who would hire me as a baby-sitter, tell me where the plunger was in case the plumbing backed up, and go out to the movies with his wife. My crush disappeared. Just like that. I still liked him, but I was no longer “infatuated,” as Mary Anne had put it.
I was pretty dressed up that Saturday afternoon. I’d worn a skirt with my turtleneck instead of my usual jeans. Why? Because the class was over, and we were about to “graduate.” We would each be getting a certificate that said we had passed the infant-care course.
We’d been told that we could invite people to the ceremony, so the room was pretty full. Kids were running around and screaming, and lots of people were talking and laughing.
Mom and Watson hadn’t been able to come, but Nannie and Charlie were there. Our associate members, Shannon and Logan, had come, and I was happy to see Logan and Mary Anne together again.
It must be hard to learn how to be friends with someone you used to go out with.
Claudia’s parents and her sister, Janine, were there, and so was Stacey’s mom. Dawn’s mom and Mary Anne’s dad sat together, looking around the room and smiling at the way the kids were playing together.
Jessi’s little sister, Becca, was the only member of the Ramsey family who could come. She had gotten a ride with the Pikes, who had turned out in full force.
I was feeling a little nervous about the graduation ceremony. Why? Well, because we had taken some tests the week before, and we were about to find out how we’d done on them. Anita had said that we had all passed, so it wasn’t that I was worried about failing. It was just that I was really hoping I had done well on the tests. I’d enjoyed the course, and I felt it was important to demonstrate that I’d learned something from it.
I should say that the tests we took weren’t called “tests” by Anita and Don. They called them “evaluations,” and they warned us not to take them too seriously.
“These evaluations are just to help us be sure you’ve learned everything you should have from the course,” Don had said.
Even though they weren’t supposed to matter so much, I did take the tests seriously.
The first one had been a written “evaluation” — a series of questions, mostly multiple-choice.
Here’s an example of one of the questions:
You are changing a diaper for six-month-old Rebecca when you hear the phone ringing in the next room. What do you do?
A) Run to answer it. The call could be important, and Rebecca’s comfortable on the changing table. She’ll wait.
B) Grab Rebecca and make a run for the phone. You might still get there before it stops ringing.
C) Let it ring. You can’t leave Rebecca alone on the changing table.
That one was easy. C, of course. But some of the other questions were a little harder. When I finished that test (I mean, evaluation) I thought I’d done pretty well. But there were one or two questions I wasn’t so sure about.
Mary Anne and I talked afterward, comparing answers. She’d had a much harder time with the test than I had — maybe because she grew up as an only child and never had the day-to-day experience with younger kids I’d had, first with David Michael and now with Emily.
The other evaluation had covered what Anita called “practical skills.” For that, we’d each had to demonstrate that we’d learned how to do certain things. For example, we had to put a diaper on a doll, following all the steps we had been taught. Then we had to clean the “baby,” put on some cornstarch-based powder (the old kind, talcum, isn’t so good for babies), and fasten the diaper securely — all while pretending that the “baby” was real.
Anita and Don watched closely. They’d told us that they would be taking points off for things like squeezing powder straight from the container — we were supposed to shake it into our hands first, so that we wouldn’t risk shooting powder into the baby’s face. We also had to make sure to keep one hand on the baby at all times, since they’d told us that it only takes a second for a baby to roll off a changing table.
We also had to show that we knew at least three ways to hold a baby safely, and that we knew where the soft spot is on a baby’s head. Plus, we had to demonstrate our burping technique. All of this was done using dolls to stand in for real babies.
I’d been so nervous while I was diapering the doll that I honestly wasn’t sure whether I’d done everything right. We’d been tested with cloth diapers, because they were harder to use. Had I slipped my hand under the diaper when I pinned it, so that I wouldn’t stick the baby? Had I remembered to fold the diaper right?
Oh, well. I’d find out soon enough.
“Can we get started?”
I heard Anita talking at the front of the room, but a lot of other people didn’t. The noise level was still pretty high.
“Attention, all graduates!” boomed Don above the racket. “Do any of you want your certificates?”
That seemed to do it. The hubbub died down, and everybody took a few minutes to find seats and settle in for the ceremony.
“We’re very proud of you,” said Anita. “Remember when I told you that you’d be baby experts by the end of the course? Well, I’d have to say that all of you have reached that goal.”
“But,” said Don, “there were only two people in the class who got every answer correct on their written evaluations and who also got top scores on the practical section.”
I leaned forward to hear what he would say next. I didn’t even dare to hope that I could be one of those people. I took a quick look around the room, trying to guess who they might be. I noticed one woman who was due to give birth that ve
ry day — Mrs. Nielsen. She’d been very good at diapering, I remembered. And I knew that Dawn had definitely aced the practical part of the evaluation. I’d watched her, and she’d done everything perfectly.
“The first person with a perfect score is John Davenport. Can you come up and get your certificate, John?” That was a surprise! Anita smiled at the bearded man who walked up and shook her hand. “Good work, John! You’re the first man in any of our classes who has gotten a perfect score.”
“And the other person,” said Don, “is one of our younger students.”
Dawn! I knew it.
“Kristy Thomas, please come forward!” he finished.
I couldn’t believe it.
I stumbled up to the front, shook hands with Don, and took my certificate from Anita. All I could say was, “Thanks!” Then I turned to sit down, but I was stopped in my tracks by a burst of applause.
“All right, Kristy!” I heard Charlie yell.
Somehow I found my seat, and I sat through the rest of the ceremony with a huge grin on my face. I felt great! Not only had I learned something new, but I’d really learned it well. I was pretty proud of myself.
It was fun to watch my friends receive their certificates. When the ceremony was over, we went into the next room, where a reception with cookies and juice would take place.
“Congratulations, Kristy!” said Dawn. “I’m so mad at myself. All I missed was one question on the written evaluation — and it was just a dumb mistake.”
“Well, we all passed, and that’s the main thing,” I said. “Plus, it was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?” I stood with my friends, laughing and talking about the course.
About five of the expectant mothers came up to us during the reception to congratulate me — and to ask for the club’s phone number! Luckily, I’d thought ahead and made sure to bring some of our fliers, so I had something to give them.
Mrs. Salem brought Ricky and Rose over to say good-bye. “I may be calling you someday,” she said to us. “These guys know how to wear out their mommy!”