keco productions: Book Club and Ginger Bread Houses

This month Connie was host for her book club's monthly meeting. The host always chooses what book we are going to read, so Connie choose a book that was the first book that she and I ever read together as a married couple: "A Long Way From Chicago". When we were flying off for our honeymoon, we found this book at a book shop in the Salt Lake Airport and read it on the long flight over to Florida. It is a cute story set in the 1920s and 1930s of a couple of kids who ever summer get shipped off for a week to stay with their Grandma Dowdel. Grandma Dowdel is a great character who is sometimes rough, sometimes dishonest, but always ultimately smart, fun, and kind.

The book mentions a lot of little historical things, so for the book club we looked up and printed off pictures of some of these things so we could get an idea of what they were : The Blue Bird Train, The Valentines Day Massacre, John Dilinger, A Hupmobile, Gooseberries,and A Terraplane 8 Hudson

In addition, an important compenent of many of the stories is Grandma's cooking. So Connie helped everyone make some tarts from scratch.

Several of ladies who came to the book club didn't have anyone to watch their kids (husbands were away from home or at the book club) so we ended up having about 7-8 kids playing and watching movies in our basement. And a few sat in to enjoy the discussion of the book.

Overall, it was a great time and we had some interesting discussions about people's ability to survive in the depression era, the effects of prohibition, and Grandma Dowdel's interesting moral compass.

Gingerbread Houses
This month we also had our annual Davies family gingerbread house decorating get together. We decided we would make a house for each of the kids this year. To save a lot of time baking gingerbread, we opted to not make our houses out of gingerbread, but instead graham crackers. I highly recommend it. The houses where much easy to make and saved a lot of baking mess. Also as a special treat this year, T and R came out from Rhode Island. It was the first time they had seen our new house and it was awesome to have a chance to catch up with them.