Ice Cream Cone Lessons

David Camps hasn’t quite learned how to get his tongue into the little pockets in  his mouth that collect food. 

I wanted the ice cream to the top.

He was on assignment this week to eat ice cream cones and learn how to chase that food out of his cheeks and down his throat.  Every job needs appropriate materials and in this case they involve a lot of sugar. 

Bonnie bought waffle cones, sugar cones, and both cone based and cup shaped ordinary cones.  As well we had the standard flavours of ice cream. 

 I wanted the D Ductchman Icecream but I was told that in this case, it would be too cow.

Sucking a vanilla cone. Sweet vanilla!

I thought eating ice cream cones just comes naturally, but we practised taking bites out of the cone instead of sticking our fingers down into the cone to get the last bit of ice cream into our mouths.  I didn’t know that a person has to turn the cone from vertical to horizontal, sometimes, to get a good grip on the edges of the cone. 

As well, doesn’t sucking the ice cream out of the hole in the bottom of the cone just come naturally.  Apparently not.  This ended up being the subject of one whole lesson. 

 David likes his ice cream pile high – one or two scoops, but in order to practise eating the cone, we started with ice-cream packed cones and no lovely mounds to lick – so that we could get right to the business at hand.

Can I blow this out?

Even the texture of the cone had to be explored, so David, sacrament like, broke the cones into four separate dishes and we took turns identifying which of the cones we were tasting – a blind fold test where we had to describe the taste of the cone:  beige-y (that person must have been peaking through their blind fold), caramel, super-sweet

Getting right into this game, I discovered the waffle and sugar cones are difficult when it comes to snipping off the end of the cones with my teeth so I can suck the ice cream through the bottom.  “The cheaper cones are so easy to do, a gummer could have success,” I said.

“What is a gummer?”, David asked.

“Oh someone who has no teeth,” I said, lisping and pursing my lips over my teeth to make me look as though I were toothless. “Haven’t you ever seen someone who has no teeth?  I will show you someone.  Grandfather, take out your teeth and show David,” I said and began to sing, “...he took out his teeth and his big glass eye ...”

When David looked at Kelvin who had begun the process of denture removal, David’s face grew still, his eyes grew wide, his skin turned to ash.  He looked at his mother to see what was happening to her.  She was just quietly watching.  A high pitched scream came out of his mouth and he bolted to his mother’s bedroom, running in circles at first and than right back to her lap where he threw his now shut eyes into her shoulders, looking for relief.

“What are we going to do now,” said Bonnie.

“David, you look at me, not at Grandfather, just at me, and no peeking at him.  Do not look at him, only at me.  Even if you can see him in your peripheral vision, do not look.”

 David could look at me for a second, but he furtively cast his eyes in Kelvin’s direction, just taking one more short look, drawn deeper and deeper into the depth of that horror.

And then another look and another and yet another.

Hey!  I am through my first cone.  Now to my second.

Kelvin’s magic trick ruined the end of the “how to suck the ice cream out of the bottom of a cone” lesson.

But David had made progress as you can see.

Oh the joys of the childhood pleasure of ice cream cones, mixed in with the first horror of seeing someone who might have eaten so much ice cream that they are now toothless.