Tradition: Dairy Queen

Starting in February, it's not uncommon to see multiple television commercials for Dairy Queen every day. From what I can tell, Dairy Queen executives use an "equal-opportunity" advertising approach in the sense that their commercials air at all times of the day and night, on every channel, and during all kinds of programming, from Sofia the First on Disney Channel to House Hunters on HGTV to Wheel of Fortune on NBC. The commercials annoy the heck out of me (the "DQ, that's what I like about T...e...h...xas" song is always stuck in my head), but they're effective - I can only watch actors posing as Dairy Queen employees whip up so many Oreo or strawberry banana Blizzards before the cravings kick in...

That first February in Texas, I told the kids we would go to Dairy Queen on the first day the temperatures climbed into the 80s. That happened like eight days later, in early March. I just couldn't wrap my head around taking Will and Hallie out for ice cream in the WINTER, so I decided to save our first Dairy Queen run of the year for the first day the temperature reached 90 degrees.

When 90 degrees arrived on a weekday afternoon in April, I took the kids to Dairy Queen. Will enjoyed his grape slushy tremendously (he was still allergic to dairy back then), but Hallie, after taking a few sips of a cherry slushy (she wanted to be just like her brother back then), dumped the remainder of her beverage INTO MY PURSE. We didn't go back to Dairy Queen for a full year after that - I couldn't afford regular trips if each one resulted in me having to purchase two slushies AND a new purse.

Last spring we continued the tradition, but with little fanfare. No slushies in the purse, but no real excitement either.

Pretty proud of myself that I figured
out how to take a screen-capture.

But this year, thanks to Dairy Queen's incessant television commercials (and I should note that the kids don't watch that much television - they're seeing three or four Dairy Commercials during an hour to an hour-and-a-half of cartoons), Will and Hallie started talking about our Dairy Queen tradition in February. Every day they checked the weather on my phone, and for a quite a while throughout April and May, Mother Nature teased them with high temperatures of 88 or 89 degrees. 

But then, two weeks ago, the ice cream odds were finally in their favor.

I made Will and Hallie water the garden and wash both of our cars (cleverly disguised as letting them play/squirt each other with the hose) before our field trip so they'd be good and hot and would appreciate an icy cold treat. 

You can tell from this picture who
wears the pants in their relationship.

They ate every last drop of those star pops, and then Will polished
off the second half of Tom's Orange Julius as well. Hungry boy.

Both Will and Hallie were good and hot, both appreciated their icy cold treats (though neither ordered actual ice cream), and now both beg me every day the temperature hits 90 degrees - which has been nearly every day since then and will be every day between now and the end of time September - to "just make a quick stop at DQ". It looks like I'm going to need to spend a little extra time at the gym this summer...

In the past my "tradition" posts have focused on other people's, community- and city-wide, and/or Texas A&M University traditions. Writing about one of our family's new-since-we-moved-to-Texas traditions, as silly of a tradition as it is, made College Station feel even more like home.