Chapter 1.

As president of the Baby-sitters Club," said Kristy Thomas, "I hereby move that we figure out what to do when Mrs. Newton goes to the hospital to have her baby."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Well, we ought to be prepared. We've been waiting for this baby for months, and theNewtons are practically our best clients. They'll need someone to take care of Jamie while his parents are at the hospital. Smart baby-sitters would be ready for the occasion."

"I think that's a good idea," spoke up Mary AnneSpier . "I second the motion." Mary Anne usually agrees with Kristy. After all, they're best friends.

I glanced across the room at ClaudiaKishi . Claudia is my best friend, and vice-president of our club. She shrugged her shoulders at me.

There are just the four of us in the Babysitters Club: Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne (she's the secretary), and me, Stacey McGill. I'm the treasurer. We've been in business for about two months. Kristy thought up the club, which was why she got to be president. We meet three times a week from five-thirty to six o'clock in Claudia's room (Claudia has a private phone), and our clients call then to line us up as sitters. The reason the club works so well is that with four baby-sitters there at the phone, each person who calls is pretty much guaranteed to get a sitter for whatever time he or she needs. Our clients like that. They say that having to make a whole bunch of calls just to line up one sitter is a waste of time. They like us, too. We're good baby-sitters. And we worked hard to get our business going. We printed up fliers and distributed them in mailboxes, and even put an ad in TheStoneybrook News, the voice ofStoneybrook , Connecticut.

That's where I live now, in this teeny-weeny town in Connecticut. Let me tell you, it's quite a shock after life in New York City. New York is a big place.Stoneybrook is not. There is only one middle school here, and I go to it. We all do. (We're in seventh grade.) InNew York there are about a billion middle schools. In fact, in New York there are about a billion of everything — people, cars, buildings, stores, pigeons, friends, and things to do.