It was the last day of summer vacation. I couldn't believe more than two months had sped by since the end of seventh grade. One day the weather had been fresh and cool with the promise of summer and fun, and now it was stale and hot with the promise of autumn and school. Tomorrow my friends and I would become eighth-graders. An awful lot had happened over the summer. In fact, it had been a more eventful summer than usual. Something important had happened to every single member of the Baby-sitters Club.

I guess that, first of all, I should tell you what the Baby-sitters Club is, in case you don't know. The club consists of me (I'm Mary Anne Spier) and my friends Kristy Thomas, Dawn Schafer, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. The five of us run a business, which Kristy started. We baby-sit for the kids in our neighborhoods, and we have a lot of fun — and earn pretty

much money, too. We meet three times a week to take calls from people who need baby-sitters, and also sometimes to gossip and fool around. But we're very professional about the way we run our business.

Anyway, here's what happened to us over the summer. I'll start with Kristy, since she's the president of the club, and since her event was the biggest and most exciting of all. Her mother got married again and Kristy was her bridesmaid! Honest. She wore a long dress and her first pair of shoes with heels. Claudia and Dawn and Stacey and I were guests at the wedding. And then Kristy and her family (her two older brothers Sam and Charlie, and her little brother David Michael) moved out of their old house, which was next door to mine, and across town to her stepfather's mansion. Kristy's really got a good deal in her new place — she has anything she wants (within reason) plus built-in baby-sitting charges. Andrew and Karen, her little stepbrother and stepsister, spend every other weekend (and some in-between time, too) at Watson's. Watson is Kristy's stepfather.