When I was a kid, I really liked a series of books by an author named Ruth Chew. All the books had "witch" in the title, though all involved different characters and different sorts of witches (all friendly or at least benign). One involved a witch who'd had some magic go awry and was now stuck upside-down, repelled by gravity; the girl in the story took her in, hid her in her room, brought her food, and kept her secret from her parents. I also remember one called "What the Witch Left" that involved a bunch of magical items that had been left in a drawer. The only one I remember specifically was a pair of seven-league boots; the girls in the story each put on one boot, hold hands, walk to Mexico, and do a little shopping.

I've found a couple of these books over the years at garage sales and book sales -- The Witch's Buttons and What the Witch Left. I stashed them on a shelf for when Molly was old enough to read them.

Molly pulled down What the Witch Left this week and has been reading it. That's how she entertained herself at the caucus we went to last night. She was telling me today about how one of the things the girls found in the drawer was a bathrobe which makes them invisible.

Molly discovering, more or less on her own, books I liked as a kid is a whole new delightful pleasure of parenting.

Molly is also doing a unit on space at her preschool. Their previous unit was on dinosaurs, which Molly could really take or leave, but she LOVES space. They have a make-believe rocket with costumes, and they've learned the names of all the planets (Molly's favorite is Saturn). We had to skip our library trip today because Molly was sick, so Ed checked out some books on space on his library run, and brought them home. I've been thinking about kids' SF I could point out to her -- I remember reading one of the mushroom planet books as a kid, though I was a little older than Molly at the time. Most of the other SF I remember reading as a kid was really geared towards older kids -- I read a lot of post-apocalyptic children's fiction by H.M. Hoover for a while, but I'd rather steer Molly towards something a little more cheerful to start off with.

My proofs for Freedom's Sisters showed up this week.

I have failed to mention this previously because I'm definitely in the "ACK! NOT THIS THING AGAIN!" stage of this book. The thing about the copyediting and proof stages is that I'm always afraid, when I pick a book back up, that this time I'm going to discover that it just sucks. And the really awful thing about the proof stage is that if it does, it's too late. I can mark typos (though there's a proofreader who will hopefully catch them anyway) and I can make minor changes, but anything that would require extensive re-typesetting will get billed to me.

On the plus side, though, this means that ARCs should be going out really soon, if they haven't already.