What do you get when you cross a precocious preschooler with a tenacious toddler? Tolerable music!

Julia has had her nose in that silly book for the past 24 hours. In classic "be careful what you wish for" style, she wanted to bring it to the table and into the tub, and she slept with it in her bed last night. This morning, as Evan sat down on the potty, he was treated to a charming rendition of the long-since-committed-to-memory tale before he'd even had a chance to urinate.

By the time we were halfway to school this morning, Julia had read her new favorite book a good dozen times and I was good and over the whole "isn't my child sweet when she reads aloud" thing. As she neared the end of the book, I was just about to break in with a series of distracting questions designed to divert her away from the text for a few minutes when I heard Evan demand that she read it yet again.

I was about to groan and demand a break when it occurred to me that if he was listening to the book, he wasn't listening to our omnipresent car music. Surreptitiously, I switched the stereo from CD to radio and held my breath for a moment. No one noticed. Emboldened by my success, I dared to turn up the volume ever so slowly, a little bit at a time. The kids were too lost in the insipid book's plot to care. Just as Evan had unceremoniously dumped the Count just weeks ago, so did he throw Ella Fitzgerald aside today for the lure of his sister's voice and an Easy Reader. Sorry, Ella. Guess you and Old McDonald have been put out to pasture on that there farm of his.

And so we drove the rest of the way to school, Julia happily indulging Evan's newest listening obsession and me happily singing along with John Lennon. Imagine all the people living life in peace, indeed. This reading aloud phase of Julia's, it's not panning out exactly as I expected it would. Things never do. But it's nonetheless a very, very good thing.