you know you're serious about your child's music education when...

you change the words in a children's book to comply with correct principles of solfege.

background: to give madeleine a head start on her music education, we have been working on teaching her perfect pitch and solfege. yes, that's right, our children are going to be randy's musical experiments.

so... madeleine has a book called, "the wheels on the school bus," (more details on this book later...) and on one of the pages it says "the music teacher on the bus says ... do re mi, all the way to school." the other day, my sister beth was over and i was reading/singing the book to madeleine when i came to this part. as soon as i sang, "do re mi," beth commented that the solfege syllables didn't match up with the melody (okay, so i didn't notice myself... so i may be the weak part of madeleine's music education... so what?). we figured out the right syllables and i've been singing it like that to her instead.* yeah, i know, we're music nazis.

while we're talking about this book anyway, i will take the opportunity to comment on it. not only is it a little different from the song i grew up with (singing "all the way to school" instead of "all around the town" has taken some getting used to), this book has some crazy characters climbing on the bus. we've got the kids, teachers, librarian, coach, nurse, lunch ladies, music teacher, art teacher, custodian, and...

SPOILER ALERT!

in the end you find out that the principal was on the bus the whole time! the last page says:

the driver on the bus says "everybody off! everybody off! everybody off!" the driver on the bus says "here we are! welcome to my school!"

and in the picture, he's switched his hat that says "driver," for one that says "principal."

tricky.

*beth - i told randy about it and how we sing it now and he decided that he wants to go with a moveable do, so we're actually singing sol mi do to her instead of do la fa.