Good morning, all! Yep, I slept in again, and I've been fighting with an eBay vendor and Paypal for the last hour.
DR SWW, I can't imagine any parent stupid enough to prevent their children from being exposed to anything worthwhile (well, there was the dumb whore - literally! - in the building next to me with the three bastards, but I ramble) and I deplore the lack of a musical education in the generation after mine. I'm still amazed when I come upon a young person with a degree in music who doesn't know elementary music theory. I also digress. The grandlads' parents seem to me to exhibit a continuous and conspicuous effort to keep tight braces on their children's brains and environment. I encourage anything you can do to prevent this.
Of course, if I ran the world, everyone would be forced to pass stringent tests about parenthood and the ones that failed would be sterilized. I guess it's good I'm not running it.
As to our TOD:
I learned to read by age 4 from record labels: my first memory is Khatchaturian's "Sabre Dance" which was a Boston Pops hit. Since my mother's six siblings all played instruments, there was always music around my grandmother's house, where my parents and I lived for the first three years of my life. I had tons of Little Golden Records, primarily classics for children and Disney songs. My mother was always singing World War II songs: one, "My Blond Sailor," was a total mystery to me until around 1981, when I came upon an Andrews Sisters recording of it.