Sarah Evans with her favorite BSC book!

It’s December, which means The Baby-sitters Club series is now available as ebooks! Obviously, we’re excited. You, our readers, keep telling us you are, too, so we’re continuing with some more Baby-sitters Club memories from our employees! Today, Sarah Evans, an editorial assistant, is here with hers. Here’s the scoop:

• Sarah started reading the BSC when she was eight years old
• Her favorite is #9, The Ghost at Dawn’s House

Take it away, Sarah!

In my room at my parents’ house is a crate filled with all my Babysitters Club books. When I was in elementary school and first started reading the BSC books, my best friend and I came up with a plan on how to collect all of them: One of us would buy all the odd-numbered books and the other would buy all the even-numbered books.

I’m not sure why this plan fell apart, but I was soon buying titles left and right, out of order, whenever I found them. Scholastic had recently reissued the books with the bandana covers, but my local library sold the old school covers in their discard section for 25 cents, and that’s how my collection really started to grow. I’ve always been a fast reader, and I quickly learned I could skim the second chapter since it always introduced the club. I could (and did!) get through a couple books in a couple hours.

The Babysitters Club books were comfort reads for me. They were something I could pick up and know that while a few things were going to go wrong, everything would work out in the end. Friends would fight, but they’d make up and be closer than ever. In elementary school, that’s definitely not a guarantee, so it was reassuring to open a book where it was.

I also loved how smart and independent the girls were. They were thirteen years old and they were running their own business. How cool was that?! The closest I got was the popcorn and lemonade stand my friends and I ran at my family’s garage sale during the neighborhood street sale. They worked together, they helped out a lot of kids who were dealing with tough stuff, and they stayed friends through all of it.

And they were just so cool! I’m pretty sure my plea for a princess phone in my bedroom was directly influenced by Claudia’s phone, though I definitely did not have my own line. I loved that Dawn’s house had a secret passage, and that Kristy lived in a mansion. And the boys! Logan and Bart were probably some of my first literary crushes (even if I did think Bart was kind of a dumb name because of The Simpsons).

I never really had a chance to babysit because on my street growing up, there were four of us girls around the same age, and I was the oldest—but the only one without younger siblings. I did briefly convince my friends that we should start a mother helper club when we were ten or so, but it never really took off. It’s too bad, because I was shaping up to be the Kristy of the group. I wasn’t really a tomboy—I played soccer and built forts, but I also took dance classes and did theater—but I sure was bossy. And like Kristy, my friends always kept me in check!

Do you have any BSC memories you’d like to share? Leave ‘em in the comments!