Just A Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream Thing About Parenting
A pregnancy story about ice cream, and really a lifestyle story
It took my wife a lot to have a kid. Normal trying. Scheduled encounters. IUI. Me not asking for a raise, just asking to be a full-time employee so the health insurance would cover IVF. The shots. The retrieval. The up and down hormones.
A failed transfer.
My wife got pregnant, technically, when I was in Oregon for The Opening.
The successful transfer was when I was in Oregon and next thing I know:
We are having a baby.
I got up everyday and made her breakfast before school (she’s a teacher). Gotta get hydrated, get fed and ready to make a strong kid before you go to teach 20+ other kids who are in elementary school.
Breakfast was easy. Lunch, making wraps and sandwiches was easy. Dinner was our normal routine.
Then she started craving dessert.
Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream to be specific.
So I made it.
There are a lot of different recipes out there but she had a specific craving:
-Graham Cracker Crust Crumbles
-Real Strawberries, not jelly or jam
-Cream cheese
I also added, because I know my wife, roasting the strawberries and adding balsamic to bring out that natural sweetness, going with more cream and less milk because it doesn’t make sense to buy whole milk when you have cream and 2% (yes, my wife an adult human woman still drinks milk every morning).
As we get into pool season, summer season with only a few weeks of school left, that itch has reared its head and we are back to ice cream season for her and our lovely daughter. Here’s how I did it last night:
-1 lb of strawberries (roasted with a little balsamic)
-1/3 c sugar
-1/2 tbsp corn starch
Put that in the blender to get a nice thick syrup, like this:
While the strawberries roast, use a ramekin to melt a few tablespoons of butter and crush up your graham crackers. A dash of sugar and the butter with the graham crackers in a bowl, like you’re making a cheesecake crust.
Both of these go into the fridge for at least an hour, I usually go 90 minutes.
Then your ice cream.
The block of cream cheese (room temp), 2.5 cups of heavy cream, 1/2 cup milk, a little vanilla and make it work together. How it started:
How it’s going:
While it is finishing I like to get the graham cracker crust out and put it down in the container because it has to still spend some freezer time even though it is already a thicc boi.
Then the ice cream goes in. Then the strawberry drip and the rest of the graham cracker crust. Then you have ice cream with a strawberry swirl, graham cracker crust:
So enjoy, if you make it let me know.
And I think telling our path to childhood was super important because so much of that burden is often placed on mothers, but it was a couple’s journey, for us. I’ve found that in the men’s community, hell in the general community, we don’t talk enough about fertility issues and the huge stress and cost it takes to get to where you want to be.
Especially within groups of men. We’re not hanging around talking about dropping off semen samples or injecting our wife at 5am with hormones and so I felt like it was a perfect time to wrap ice cream with, “let’s have a baby!” nope, luckily for us, “we’re having a baby!”
Coming off of Mother’s Day, I felt like this was a great time for this. Having a lot of friends who are in same sex marriages who are traversing the becoming parents world, it felt like the right time. Starting swim team with several kids who were adopted, it felt like the right time.
I guess what I’m saying is this wouldn’t be mother’s day without acknowledging now just how hard being a mother is, but for a lot of people, how hard it is to become a mother.
Cheers!!
Woo, this one hit. Two years of every possible fertility treatment through donor eggs, a late (14-15 weeks) miscarriage, and finally adoption. Didn’t break our marriage but did put a few dents in it.