"Order! Order, please. Order!" Kristy Thomas rapped on Claudia Kishi's desk with the eraser end of a pencil. "This meeting of the Babysitters Club will now come to order - and I mean it!"

Kristy was having trouble getting our attention. The members of the Baby-sitters Club were kind of wound up. We were getting two new official members that afternoon, Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey, and besides, we'd had a half-day off from school because of teachers' meetings.

Mary Anne Spier, Claudia, Jessi, Mal, and I (Dawn Schafer) were all sprawled around Claudia's room, talking and laughing. Kristy was looking down on us from the director's chair she always sits in, and she didn't seem too happy.

Before I go any further, maybe I should explain who the club members are, and what

the Baby-sitters Club is. I'll start with the club, which was Kristy's idea. She and Mary Anne used to do a lot of baby-sitting in their neighborhood, and Kristy realized that any time a parent needed a sitter, he or she had to make about a zillion phone calls trying to find someone who was free. She thought, Wouldn't it be great if a parent could make one call and reach a whole bunch of sitters at once? So she got a group of friends together to form the club, and now we meet three times a week - Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from 5:30 until 6:00. Our clients know about our meetings (we advertise), and they call us while we're holding them. There are six members of the club now, and usually at least one of us is free and can take any job that comes in. Great for the parent (only one call to make, plus we are responsible, trustworthy sitters). And great for us (we each get lots of jobs, have fun, and earn money).

We run our club very professionally. We sitters are always on time, we make sure we know important information, such as where the parents will be and when the children should go to bed, and we're just plain great with kids. We love them! We have a club record book in which Mary Anne keeps track of our clients and appointments (she's the