Got a rejection from another agent on Friday which left me feeling pretty discouraged. Couldn't even make myself look at the SFF section when we went to Borders with Andy's mom and dad on Saturday, although Guy Gavriel Kay's new book did catch my eye. (It's based on Vikings. Couldn't someone have predicted that? ;-) I am trying to moderate my book-buying addiction, however, as I have blown through at least 12 books and a packet of _Growing Without Schooling_ back issues in the past couple of weeks. My homeschooling/unschooling reading craze is finally dying down (although I did buy John Holt's _Learning All the Time_ and A.S. Neill's _Summerhill_ yesterday... I'd gotten the Holt book out of the library a couple years ago, but you can't read books over and over whenever the whim strikes you if they're in the library and it's 11 PM and you're nursing a child to sleep). Anyway, today I picked up another book I had sitting around, about Georg Cantor and the mathematical theorem that apparently drove him insane. This is a good sign, as I was beginning to think that I was going to spend most of my life being uninterested in anything but books on education.

The visit with the in-laws went well, very low-key, just a lot of baseball-watching, as the Cardinals are in the World Series and St. Louis is basically shutting down for that. Today after they left we went to the pumpkin patch, along with about a million other people, and carted a really huge pumpkin out of a field. It's not one of the pretty ones, just a big, malformed, red-orange giant, too flat and yellow on one side from lying on the ground. But it's got a nice smooth face for carving, and the kids were all giggly about rolling it across the field and heaving it into the cart.

But the best thing about the past few days is that E. has finally learned to walk :-).