Review: "Dawn's Family Feud: The Baby-Sitters Club #64"

Dawn's Family Feud: The Baby-Sitters Club #64 by Ann M Martin
2 out of 5 stars

This book gets 1 star for Claudia's outfit below and 1 star for Mrs Barrett finally getting her "happily ever after". No stars for Dawn or Mary Anne or their entire plotline. But I guess I'll go over it anyway.

Jeff is coming to town to visit for a whole week and Dawn is understandably super excited. Mr Spier takes off for the whole week to spend it with Jeff and suggests they take a family roadtrip to either Washington DC or Boston at the end of the week. The first few days are great, everyone is getting along and they have lots of fun making fun of a silly alien movie and eating Mexican food. But then the girls have to go to school, Jeff is left alone with Mr Spier (Mrs Schafer has to work), and Jeff gets sulky when he's forced to clean up after himself and the Pike boys don't want to play soccer. Things go downhill from there. Mr Spier is boring (duh), Dawn & Mary Anne start bickering amongst themselves, "a crack was starting to form in [their] family".

Let's pause the misery for a What Claudia was Wearing, shall we! Today for instance she was dressed in black overalls that she had splattered with pink and green and yellow globs of paint. Her purple high top tennis shoes matched her purple long sleeve t-shirt. Claud has beautiful black shining hair that she'd fixed in a French braid. On top of her head perched a little white painter's cap that she'd also splattered with paint. She looked awesome. (She always does.) (I would totally wear this outfit today. Also, those were my wedding shoes. :))

Okay, back to the Spier-Schafer breakdown. They head out on their trip to Boston. Jeff pouts because he suddenly changes his mind and wants to go to DC. Mary Anne thinks Jeff is being a pest and hurting her dad's feelings, Dawn thinks Mary Anne is being a baby, none of the 3 kids want to do anything that the "other family" does. Including share a hotel room, go on the same sightseeing tours, and eat at the same restaurants. And for some reason, their parents go along with it, splitting up into their "original families". Like, what? No. This is a family vacation, you do things together, whether you like it or not. Also, Dawn and Mary Anne are 13 years old and old enough to baby-sit. Let them go off on their own and the parents can do what they want. Ugh. Anyway, the trip is a huge failure and they head home early. 

Dawn's mom has scheduled a photographer to come and take a family picture before Jeff leaves and since they're all fighting still, it starts off awful. None of the kids are wearing their fancy clothes, the parents bicker over where to stage the photo, Mary Anne wants Tigger in the picture but he runs off, and everyone has angry faces. When they all see the test shots they realize how stupid they're all being and start laughing, breaking the tension finally. Everyone apologizes, retakes the pictures, and enjoys Jeff's last day there.

Alright, let's move on to the part that rated a star: Mrs Barrett finally getting her a decent man lol. You remember Mrs Barrett, right? The divorced mom of 3 who was kind of a wreck until Dawn helped her get her life turned around? Well she's finally found a good man and his name is Franklin DeWitt. The impossible 3 love Franklin, until they find out he has 4 kids of his own! Yikes. And they're all around the same age. Disaster in the making. The kids don't get along, the adults don't know how to handle it, and the baby-sitters save the day, as usual. Mrs Barrett makes her kids dress up for a fancy dinner, there's a disaster picnic in which a goat steals a sandwich, and lots of crying. Towards the end, the kids realize it's more fun to get along and play games together and it's all good. I do remember Mrs Barrett & Franklin getting married eventually, but not sure when. I'm sure there will be more drama before they do.

Happy Bookish Sisters!

So yesterday, I shared my wonderful bookish wedding photos and today, I wanted to do a quick post to share 2 other pictures we took at Half Price Books that day. My sister was our only in-person witness and she did double (triple? whatever) duty as bridesmaid, groomsman, camera person, makeup artist, and lots more. She also threw me a fantastic bridal shower and I got to see my extended family members for the first time all year. So I wanted to make sure we took some pictures together that day too.

I decided we needed to commemorate one of our favorite bookish memories. When we were kids and our parents would take us to B Dalton's Bookstore, my sister and I would head straight to the children's section. I'd help her pick out a new Berenstain Bears book and I would get the latest Baby-Sitters Club. Then we'd sit on the floor and read until our parents were ready to go. It was such fun to recreate that!

Happy Bookish Wedding Post!

I'm not sure why I haven't posted about this yet, I guess I forgot I could lol. On October 23, 2020 I got to marry my best friend, my favorite fellow bookish nerd. We met in 2017, thru a mutual online friend, had our first date at Half Price Books, and have been loving life and each other ever since. We got engaged Christmas Day 2019, started planning a fun wedding, and then hello, COVID19 hit. We knew we wanted to get married in October so we decided to wait it out. And wait and wait. And then we decided to change our plans, go smaller, simpler, but still us.

I found my dress online very cheap and it fit perfectly, my sister made our masks and did my hair & makeup, and my former work BFF made our flowers, out of Harry Potter pages. (I found the oldest used copy possible, don't worry!) We bought our Doctor Who inspired rings on Etsy from C9TTungsten  and added in purple accents to match them. Yes, I wore purple Converse sneakers! 

We started with a courthouse ceremony with just my sister as a witness. The rest of our friends and family watched on Facebook Live. (We were so happy the courthouse had good WiFi lol.) Yes, we wore masks throughout and it was both strange and normal at the same time. Afterwards, the 3 of us had a lovely lunch and then headed to our favorite Half Price Books, where we had our first date, to take wedding pictures. I called ahead of time and got it okayed with the manager, we went in a middle of a weekday so it wasn't very crowded, and we made sure to stay away from everyone else. And it was so much fun. We may not have had the wedding we wanted in the beginning, but it was an absolutely perfect day, and we will never forget it!

RInfinity Photography was recommended by my stepmom and she was so wonderful to work with and our pictures came out amazing. We used some of our favorite books as props (and of course bought them afterwards because we couldn't resist) and just had fun and laughed a lot. It was so nice to be back in a bookstore, among all my fictional friends. Oh yeah, and enjoy the time with my husband. :) And now, more picture fun! (Click any of them to make bigger)