Ice cream dump

Kids don't always know the words for things, and I sometimes love the results of them trying to figure things out. Tonight, we were dishing up home-made ice cream that had hardened into something more similar to a strawberry-pineapple iceberg.

But oh was it good…

A non-artist's (bad) rendition of homemade pineapple-strawberry ice cream.
 Come on, you know you'd love to eat this!

Anyway, I usually just use our spoons to scoop the ice cream since the two years I spent post marriage shopping for the right silverware were well spent. My wife frequently tells people how we agreed to disagree on silverware for those two years. But the good news is we came out better for it. Too many of the sets we found were just sissy looking and feeling. I want beefy silverware - a fork I can cut meat with if needs be. A knife that's consequently only used for sawing through butter or spreading peanut butter. A spoon that can scoop ice cream like nobody's business. 

So in that shopping period, I subjected every rare set of silverware we agreed to aesthetically to the “ice-cream test.” This is Guantanamo Bay for spoons.

It entails me subtly withdrawing a spoon from packaging in stores, placing the cup of the spoon against my palm and seeing how much pressure it takes before it bends. If I apply pressure and it immediately looks like a mini 9-iron, I bend it back to shape as best as I can and replace it in its packaging for the next person who’s not savvy enough to know the drill. I just hope people wash their new bendy spoon before use.

When I finally found our silverware, the spoon held up to its torture session, revealing none of the flimsy secrets I thought its maker might be hiding. We rejoiced and bought two sets, knowing it would be out of production by the time we needed more 10 years down the road.

We love that silverware, but even it fails the strawberry-pineapple iceberg test. Not in the fact that it bends, but in the fact that the end of the spoon drills a hole through my hand before the cup side digs up the flavored goods. So I had to break out the big gun that I rarely use: the ice-cream scoop.

Its nice wide handle distributes the pain from digging into a glacier across a larger surface area, making it a better companion than my beloved spoon in unusual circumstances. Now to the point. As I was using our manly-looking pink ice cream scoop, my 2-year-old girl toddled up and asked, “Is that an ice cream dumper?”

An "ice cream dumper."

I laughed and said, “Yes, it’s an ice cream dumper.” I’ll never call it anything else again.

I’ve found I use similar tactics when trying to vocabulize words that theretofore ne’er existipated. But it’s not nearly as cute when I use descriptive monikers in Spanish to say stuff like – “You know, that thing you use to put salt to your food?”

Maybe I should’ve called it a salt dumper. I’ll leave cute linguistics in the hands of the 2-year-old expert, I think.