Old MacDonald Had An Apartment House

My favorite book when I was a kid was Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi and Ronald Barrett.¹ So I was excited when the kids brought home a book from the library from the same authors that I hadn’t seen before: Old MacDonald Had An Apartment House. The story is about an apartment building super who starts growing food and raising livestock in vacant apartments as the increasingly alarmed tenants move out. Totally awesome 70s hippie energy crisis stuff. It didn’t click that I had actually read (and loved!) this book as a kid until we reached this page:

Love that page. Hot and cold running sweet potato vines.

1. I still have my 1970s-era copy that I read with my kids. It’s delicate though, so I bought them their own copy to read on their own too. The upsetting part is there are minor differences in the text (but not drawings) of the two books. And the new phrasing is worse…no idea why they’d change it.↩

• books
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
• Judi Barrett
• Old MacDonald Had An Apartment House
• parenting
• Ronald Barrett