For those familiar with the children's entertainment industry, the names Judy and David are as inseparable as those of their singing forefathers Sharon, Lois and Bram. They are a singing duo, heroes to young kids and saviours to their busy parents. Selling over five million albums worldwide hasn't hurt the couple's notoriety either, nor has a feature article in Billboard magazine and a recent Juno Award. Add to that the fact that more than a duo, they are a couple and proud parents of a one-year-old son, and it seems as if they're living the perfect life. But it wasn't always this way.

In the early '9Os David was working in the centre of the entertainment business. Not as a performer but as an account executive at TVO and even before that for another company, helping to promote other children's acts. But as an old camp song leader and a natural performer&emdash;the guy everyone watches at parties do silly things, as Judy puts it &emdash;a certain part of him was left hungry. He started doing small concerts and performing at schools in his spare time while holding down his job. For the moment, his dream to be a children's performer was unsatisfied. That is, until the day David met Judy.

Judy was an associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music and had studied piano performance at the University of Toronto. She was serious about her music but knew the solitude of performing classical piano was not for her. She wouldn't be able to sing, write or teach&emdash;at least not as much as she wanted to. She wanted to interact with an audience, loved kids and so made the practical decision to go into teaching. With a little bit of the camp song leader background in her too, she couldn't see herself performing before a quiet audience of three-piece-suits and fanning ladies. And yet teaching, although enjoyable, left that performance side of her wanting. The day she saw a Sharon, Lois and Bram concert with her niece, everything suddenly began to make sense.

"I was so impressed by the calibre of the performance and how professional they were," she says. "At the end of the show I got a lump in my throat. I mean who gets a lump in their throat at a Sharon, Lois and Bram concert? I think something was telling me that this was the perfect combination of all the things I loved to do."

And then Judy met David. He happened to be playing at a school where she was teaching. She admired his rapport with the kids and immediately the wheels started turning.

"The first thing I thought of when I saw him was, 'Wouldn't this be great to do as a duo.' But I also thought, 'Gee, he's awful cute."'

They started talking that day about forming an act together. But they both admit now that it was definitely just an excuse to start up a conversation. Luckily for their fans, it gradually became more than a romance.

David started bringing Judy along with him as a "sidekick" to his gigs. At first she played tambourine in the background: "I felt like Tracy Partridge," she says. Because David had established some contacts and was playing semi regularly, he would ask at each venue if it was okay to bring along Judy to play in his act. It soon became apparent that was going to change.

"It quickly became 'Don't bother showing up without Judy,"' says David, laughing. "We were having a fabulous love affair and we got engaged, and as far as the relationship everything was going great. But when it came to making music together it was really tough because we

were both such individuals about our music and we had very different strengths."

Those individual strengths became essential and complementary as their career went further. A few months into their marriage, David decided that the business side was not for him and he quit his job at TVO. So, Judy continued to teach in North York to pay the bills while David devoted all his time to their dream. Two years later, she quit too. Judy and David became a full-time gig. This is where their different skills really began to benefit the whole act.

"I can barely read music. But I am great with coming up with an idea for a song," explains David. "I could not ever compete with Judy's vocal abilities. However, I can sing really loud and do a raunchy rock number better than Judy can. But Judy is a phenomenally talented musician. She can play a bit of every instrument ever made and is great with understanding musical theory. I'm sort of a guitar hack and a drum hack but I'm very strong on the business side of things, understanding how to get our music and our concerts out there."

"By far our best material is when we both collaborate," says David. "It can't be the two of us sitting together at a piano and starting from scratch."

"Not if we want to keep our marriage together," adds Judy.

After their successful demo tape attracted a record company's attention, Judy and David began work on their highest-selling recording to date, reaching platinum status in Canada alone. Working on deadline, they completed 80 songs in six weeks. My Little Yellow Bus is the result; consisting of four hours of music on four tapes packaged in a toy wooden school bus. The album has since been sold internationally and translated into several different languages.

Today they have six albums to their credit and, sitting around their kitchen table over Judy' s homemade banana bread and some lemon tea, they don't hesitate to admit that all of their dreams are coming true. Recording until midnight the night before and hard at work again at seven this morning, they're surprisingly chipper.

"About a month ago I said to Judy, 'All our dreams have come true or are about to come true,"' says David. "We are now living a dream."

A big part of that dream has been filled by their blonde haired boy. A newborn during the recording of their Juno award-winning Livin' in a Shoe album, Jared is literally growing up with his parents' music. He even makes a guest appearance on the album. While recording the song "Lullaby," Jared cried while the tape was rolling. It fit so perfectly they left it in.

The couple moved north of Toronto, to Richmond Hill, when first they first married seven years ago.

Since then, they've worked almost exclusively out of their home: recording, composing and taking care of the business. As performers they're on the road a lot touring the continent and though it's hard to leave home they have it better than most musicians. On the Judy and David tours the whole family comes along. Usually Judy or David's mother will come to take care of one-year-old Jared while they're on stage, sometimes making it more like a family outing than a tour. Setting up their business at home has also been a real advantage for them. "It's perfect, because we have all the amenities of the Toronto area," David says. "And we can attract great people from a large population base to work with and still live a little bit out of the fray." Clean air, places to park, less traffic and&emdash;oh yeah&emdash;there's aqua tots.

"I have to brag," says Judy excitedly. "Jared is a graduate of aqua-tots. It's a Richmond Hill Parks and Rec program. It's a gorgeous pool on Spadina Road at 16th Avenue. It's fabulous for children because it's got this huge shallow pool just for babies and it's really, really warm."

There's so much going on right now for Judy and David that they've hired a business manager to help out. A new TV show is coming soon and they hope to have both a new story-based CD and a re-release of My Little Yellow Bus out before Christmas. Their giant web-site (judyanddavid.com) gets over 1,000 hits a day, plus they already have double the number of concerts scheduled for next year. And as for the long-term future, watching Jared slap a set of bongo drums around at the end of our interview it's clear they might just have another musician in the family. Judy and David... and Jared coming to a record store near you?