MAKING ICE CREAM — AND NEW MEMORIES
Museum show combines science and fun for kids emerging from pandemic routines
The boy with the silver balloon sat waiting for the ice-cream show to begin.
None of the visitors to the Children’s Museum of Houston seemed to have come specifically to see the ice cream show, or even to know or care that it was National Ice Cream Day. But it was a blazing-hot Saturday, and the blessedly air-conditioned museum was at its COVID-era capacity, admitting only people who’d bought tickets with scheduled entry times.
Kavai Brown, 9, said the water exhibits outside were what excited her most. Her sister Kameron, 6, declared that she was thrilled about “everything!” Janna George’s pre-teens, visiting from Los Angeles, were drawn to Makerspace, an exhibit that lets kids build gizmos. Michael Gabriel and his 3-year-old had just moved to Houston from Iowa, and were scoping out the museum for the first time.
A loudspeaker announcement
said that the ice-cream show would start in 10 minutes, and the tables in front of the stage began to fill. Whatever the ice-cream show was, it promised a chance for overstimulated toddlers to chill out, and for tired adults to sit down.
The boy with the balloon and his relatives claimed a table near the back. (The boy’s dad, Jimmy Tseng, asked that his son not be named.) While the adults talked, the boy, 6, and two younger cousins kept their eyes on the stage. The summer before, when pandemic restrictions were in full force, there had been no outings to the museum, no live shows, no big rooms full of strangers. They’d lived inside their extended-family bubble. It was good to be out in the world.
On the stage, social studies educator Danni Dancer put on a tiedyed lab coat. She asked the kids if they liked ice cream. She asked their favorite flavors. Then she rattled off the three ingredients needed to make ice cream: something milky that has some fat; a little sugar; and something — maybe vanilla — for flavor.
It was, of course, a sneaky science lesson. The boy liked lessons like this: live, in-person, with a big audience and lots of action. It was the opposite of his first semester of kindergarten. Three times a day he’d seen his teacher on a computer screen, for 30 minutes at a stretch.
Tseng, the boy’s dad, thought that was sad — not what kindergarten is supposed to be about.
The boy’s dad and mom did what they could to keep him company. On Saturday nights, the three of them watched movies. All the other six nights of the week, they played board games. The boy’s grandparents had somehow managed to preserve games from the 1980s, games like Trouble, Sorry and Monopoly.
The games taught the boy math, his dad thought. But mainly, they were about doing something together.
Dancer moved into the show’s action phase. Before COVID hygiene, the ice cream might have been made with Ziploc bags full of real cream and sugar and vanilla, with the finished product spooned out to the crowd. But today, the woman explained, they’d use single-serving coffee creamers.
The woman loaded little blue containers of French Vanilla International Delight into a plastic bag, then put the bag in a big jar of salted icewater — salt to keep the water extra-cold. For her kid assistants, too small to shake a heavy jar, she put plastic bags of creamers into bigger plastic bags of salted icewater.
The woman shook the bucket. The assistants shook the bags. They shook and they shook.
The boy, his cousins and his mom left the table and stood next to the stage, where kids had gathered.
By now, the boy was used to being around loads of kids: He started school in-person in January, and now goes to summer school. School is much better in person.
He still plays board games with his mom and dad, but now it’s maybe one night every two weeks. Sometimes his dad is nostalgic for those six nights every week.
On stage, Dancer stopped shaking the jar and tested a creamer. It still wasn’t frozen.
The boy tossed the silver balloon into the air. It drifted back down, slow as the pandemic’s ebb.
At long last, Dancer pronounced the ice cream done and handed containers of French Vanilla International Delight to the kids at the stage’s edge. The boy and his cousins took theirs back to the table, peeled off the foil caps, and licked the stuff out.
It was frozen coffee creamer, not ice cream. But it was cold, and it was sweet. Maybe someday they’d feel nostalgic for it, too.