Tax Deduction #1 is 5 and can’t read much yet. Bad Mommy! Bad Mommy! Call social services.

Okay, well, I keep a CD player in her room so she can have music (“lullabies”) and we’ve been doing this for about 7 months, I guess, givvertake.

CD #1 was Kenny Loggins’s Return to Pooh Corner. That lasted about 4 months.

CD #2 was Tina Malia’s Lullaby Favorites. That lasted about 3 months.

She wanted the Nutcracker next (took her to the ballet last Christmas), but I couldn’t find my CD. (Must be in another case somewhere–I hate it when that happens.)

So we’ve been on CD #3 now for about a week and a half. It’s just one of those compilation samplers of baroque (you know, the musical equivalent of the bathroom book of quotations to make you seem really smart at cocktail parties).

She says to me, she says, “Mama, there’s a springtime song!”

Oh, really? I mean, I know which one she’s probably talking about, but where/how does she know it’s the “springtime song”? Did she learn that at school? (Cause, wow, great school!) Or does it just magically say “Hey, I’m a springtime song” to a kindergartner?

So she’s on me about this, right? Tonight I turn on her “lullabies” (she had a meltdown when I told her it was really called “baroque,” so we’re back to “lullabies”) and she says to me, she says, “Number 9 is the springtime song.” So I look and why, yes, it is, right there, #9. I asked her a bunch of questions about how she knew this (well, I guess interrogated would be a better word), but she didn’t cough anything up.

I decided to go on the theory that a 5-year-old, when listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1, automatically knows that that’s the springtime song.

Because to think otherwise would take away the magic.