Ice Cream

I   Ice Cream Cones

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”

One of the things I love about summer is a trip to an ice cream parlour for an ice cream cone.

When I was young we went to Dairy Queen, and had soft ice cream dipped in chocolate. It was routine to take the dog with us, and for him we bought a baby cone, minus the chocolate. Everybody knows chocolate is bad for dogs.

The drug store offered hard ice cream in a variety of flavours. The woman in the store was a friend and we always got extra big scoops. One day, while trying to manage the drips on my cone, I fell behind the rest of my family. I ran to catch up, still trying to manage my cone and took hold of my dad’s hand, only it wasn’t my dad.

The two men laughed, waiting for me to realize my mistake. Such were easier and more innocent times.

Now it’s trips to the corner convenience store with the grandkids. I love how they plaster their faces to the glass of the display case, their eyes poring over all the different colours and flavours from which to choose.

Kids have to be shown how to properly and efficiently eat an ice cream cone. Believe me; the ability to do this is important if you ever want to let that child back in your car.

How to keep that ice cream from dripping all over the place on a hot summer day, and walk away with a minimum of mess takes experience and skill.

First, they need to lick all around the ice cream to prevent any drips from reaching their hand, thereby reducing the level of stickyness.

If they’re going to take a bite, bite from the top, and keep licking. It’s paramount that they don’t let the drips get ahead of them.

Remind them to turn the cone in their hand; drips don’t just happen on the side they see in front of them.

I realized the importance of this when I sat at a patio table with three kids, ages 10, 7 and 4 years. The drips were coming fast and furious, becoming one massive melt; their hands covered in ice cream. There were not enough napkins in the world to clean up that mess.

After that day, I’ve kept a package of wet ones in the car, for just such sticky situations.

A word of warning.

The kids tend to like flavours like Tiger’s Tail, or Bubblegum. I mean sticky is sticky, but it’s seems much more of a mess when it’s orange and black, or bright blue rather than the white of a vanilla based flavour.

If you’ve taken it upon yourself to teach the younger generation this very important skill, be brave. It may require more than one lesson, maybe a refresher course at the beginning of every summer.

What we do for family.