Food! Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

I hate feeding my family. My husband is on a quest to eat healthier and lose weight. He complains if I keep any sort of fattening snacks in the house or if I make a meal that contains too many "Points". My preschooler is chronically underweight and requires a high-calorie diet. She is also the slowest eater alive and can take 2 hours to finish a small meal. My toddler is also underweight, hates anything that contains protein, and would live off of pasta and cheerios if I let her. I could feed a small orphanage with the food she's refused to eat any given week. Her 15-month appointment is in a couple weeks and I'm sweating bullets trying to get her and Little Page at a decent weight before then.

Because food is such a chore in our house, I enjoy any book that makes it fun! This week we are CELEBRATING food through books and crafts.

The Book - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett

We haven't seen the movie yet, but that's because we needed to read the book first. (I know you'd never see a movie before having read the book!) In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Grandpa makes a batch of pancakes and then tells his grandkids about the town of Chewandswallow. In Chewandswallow there are no food stores or restaurants. People get their food from the sky, where it rains down meatballs, blows in hamburgers, and drizzles soda. Three times a day, the people receive their sustenance from the sky until one day the weather turns for the worse. Tomato tornadoes, bread hurricanes, and other catastrophes hit the town until the townspeople decide something must be done.

There's a reason this book has survived two generations. Kids are captivated with the idea of food and drink falling from the sky like rain. The illustrations are simple and slightly stylized, allowing your imagination to fill in the rest.

The Craft - A Meatball Diorama

You have no idea the number of hours of entertainment this has provided Little Page. I needed to do something with this shoebox or throw it away, so I suggested we create a "stage" for the story. Little Page helped me thread the red puffs for meatballs. I taught her the different types of clouds while she glued cotton balls to the ceiling. (We decided that it was definitely cumulonimbus that rained the meatballs.) And she tore apart tissue paper for the grass. She requested falling hamburgers, but I only found one picture, so it looks a little lonely. If you're wondering what the white stuff in front is, they are pipe cleaners she insisted on laying down for a sidewalk. Apparently, the citizens of Chewandswallow don't walk on the grass.