Itchy Bitchy Spider

June was enumerating the books she can "read".* In her enumerations, she included "Itchy Bitchy Spider". For a micro-second I was startled, perhaps even outraged, for though "Itchy Bitchy Spider" might be an excellent book in its own right, it hardly seems like appropriate reading material for a five-year-old.

Then the parsing-context-clues-and-assembling-plausible-meanings part of my brain caught up with the turning-raw-sounds-into-elemental-strings-of-words part, and it occurred to me that June probably meant "Itsy Bitsy Spider", and I could throw the shocked-letter-to-the-teacher I was mentally composing into the mental trash can.

But still, it made me curious, how would that go?

"The itchy bitchy spider crawled up..."

* "Read" here is being used in the expansive sense often employed by pre-literate children, meaning "recite from memory while looking at the book and turning the pages, creating an external semblance of what is more conventionally considered to be 'actual' reading".