The Baby-Sitters Club That Had Everything Except Clients

In the summer of 1992, four girls in an Allen neighborhood decided to start a babysitting business.

We had no clients, no experience, and only a passing familiarity with children who were not ourselves. But we did have construction paper, markers, and the kind of confidence available only to children who have never filed taxes.

The executive board of Rockefeller’s least profitable babysitting empire. We had four officers, approximately one client, and absolutely no concerns about overhead.

I was ten. My best friend Shannon lived next door, April lived behind my house, and Kim lived one street over. One afternoon, the four of us were gathered at Kim’s house when someone—I believe it was Kim—announced that we should start a babysitting club for the neighborhood.

Being ten, this sounded completely reasonable.

We were at the beginning of summer, when every idea still seemed possible because nobody had become bored enough to start fighting over who was cheating at Marco Polo. A babysitting club would give us something to do, earn us money, and possibly make us the most important people on Rockefeller Lane.

We immediately assigned offices: president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer.

I bet you can guess who assigned everyone.

Here is a hint: it was not me.

That is how I found myself appointed treasurer of a company that did not yet have money, customers, or a clear understanding of what a treasurer did.

Had I read any of The Baby-Sitters Club books by then?

No.

Did I understand bookkeeping?

Also no.

But I could add, and apparently that was enough to make me chief financial officer.

Like the real Baby-Sitters Club, we had a strong-willed president, handmade advertising, and the potential for interpersonal tension. Unlike the real Baby-Sitters Club, we had approximately one customer.

First, however, we needed flyers.

We spent an entire afternoon designing them, because girls that age did not simply write BABYSITTERS AVAILABLE on a piece of paper and move on with their lives. These flyers represented us. They needed lettering, borders, decorative flourishes, and possibly several colors that were nearly impossible to read against one another.

Those flyers had to look like the bomb.

Once our advertising campaign was complete, we walked up and down both sides of Rockefeller, placing flyers wherever four children believed potential clients might see them. We were not merely hanging paper. We were launching a local enterprise.

Then we went home and waited beside the telephone.

And waited.

And waited.

I can only assume Kim’s father forgot to pay the phone bill that month, because that phone never rang.

We never had to compete with a rival babysitting agency. The local babysitting market could barely support us.

There were no frantic calls from overwhelmed parents. No emergency requests. No mysterious families with seven children, a dog, and a baby who refused to sleep unless someone sang all four verses of a song nobody knew.

There were also no dreamy lifeguards distracting us from our responsibilities, which was fortunate, since our responsibilities consisted mainly of waiting for responsibilities.

We had our own bossy Kristy, but never a Boy-Crazy Stacey. Boys did not come between us—mostly because boys did not come anywhere near us.

Our club never broke apart over romantic complications. We remained united by the much stronger bond of having no business whatsoever.

Eventually, we did what children do when their grand plan fails to attract public interest: we went to our mothers and asked them to fix it.

Shannon had a younger brother who was around six, so we babysat him. I do not remember him requiring much supervision, but he counted as a child and lived outside the club’s management structure, so we considered it a legitimate booking.

My mother also found us work through church. Whenever she volunteered to help a woman in the ward by watching her children, she occasionally turned the assignment over to us and paid us herself.

In other words, our largest client was my mother, who was both supplying the children and financing the transaction.

It was less a thriving business than a maternal economic stimulus package.

Thankfully, none of us ever neglected eight children so we could flirt with a lifeguard. We would have needed eight children first.

By the end of our babysitting empire, we had earned a grand total of $19.46. This was enough for a pizza party with sodas, followed by a distribution of $2.73 to each club member.

As treasurer, I handled the money honestly.

I did not embezzle so much as a nickel from that $19.46. There were no offshore accounts, questionable reimbursements, or secret purchases from the candy aisle at Tom Thumb. Every cent was accounted for, although I cannot explain why I remember the exact amount more than thirty years later while routinely forgetting why I walked into a room.

Perhaps $19.46 feels enormous when you are ten.

It was not really the money we were after anyway. We wanted to create something. We wanted official titles and meetings and colorful flyers. We wanted to walk through our neighborhood believing that behind any front door might be a tired parent urgently searching for four elementary-school businesswomen.

The phone did not ring, but for a little while we believed it could.

That is the part I miss about being ten. An afternoon at a friend’s house could become a company. A stack of markers could become a marketing department. A six-year-old brother could become our most valued client. And a mother quietly paying four girls to complete the volunteer work she had already agreed to do could make us feel as though our business was succeeding on its own.

We did not become wealthy. We did not expand beyond Rockefeller. We did not even make it through enough customers to justify having a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer.

But we had a pizza party. We each went home with $2.73. And for one summer, four neighborhood girls had the pleasure of believing we were going places.

Technically, we mostly went up and down Rockefeller handing out flyers.

But every major corporation has to start somewhere.