My mom told me a funny story the other day: when I was very young - maybe 3, perhaps less, but at any rate way younger than proficient reading age, my parents had bought me Peter and the Wolf: it was a child's illustrated book and it came with a LP record of Prokofiev's music, overlaid by a narrator reading the story in the book.
According to my mom (I don't remember myself of course) I was completely enthralled by the story and I kept asking her to play the record over and over. And somehow, over time, I learned to turn the pages of the book at exactly the right moment in the recording.
One afternoon, one of my dad's colleagues came home to visit. At the time, I was listening to Peter and the Wolf again, and turning the pages to look at the pretty pictures in cue with the narrator.
My dad's colleague saw this and said "holy smoke, he can *read* already?", convinced as he was that I was following the record reading the text. So my dad, with his wry sense en humor, looked at him without flinching and replied "oh sure, he started a year ago or something" and matter-of-factly moved on to another topic. The guy's jaw dropped but said nothing more.
Apparently he repeated the incredible story of "Philip's genius toddler who could read before he could walk" at work, and the legend stuck at the office for years, much to my dad's amusement
