Refrigerator Hunting and An Old-Fashioned Dairy

Tonight was a really fun night.  We headed to Sears to continue our refrigerator search, and found one with little hassle and in not that much time at all (yay!). :)  (I was happy because the one mom ended up liking and getting was the one I had suggested in the first place.) :)

We have some Fitz's root beer in the fridge (in our opinion, the best root beer ever- from a small bottling company in University City, where we used to live here in St. Louis before we lived in FL), so we wanted to stop and get some ice cream to make root beer floats.  We missed the turn for Dierberg's (one of two main grocery stores here- the other is Schnuck's), so when I saw a sign for a small ice cream shop, I suggested we turn in and buy some vanilla ice cream there.

When we headed inside to Oberweis Dairy, we found that it was a small, family-owned dairy that sells milk in glass bottles and is a lot like some of the dairies my mom grew up with in Ohio.  They didn't have a tub of ice cream small enough for us to eat in one night (we still don't have a freezer until tomorrow at the earliest), so we decided to wait on the root beer floats and get a treat there.

Old-fashioned glass dishes :)

The man who greeted us at the counter was a perfect example of a Midwestern gentleman.  He was so welcoming and friendly, and even gave us a free half-gallon of their skim milk in the glass bottle for us to try.  Then, he gave Ben and I each a $5 coupon to spend in the store on anything we wanted.  He said he wanted to make sure that we would be returning customers, and wanted us to stop drinking "the artificial milk that's always tainted by the plastic bottles nowadays". :)  You can even have their milk and other products delivered to your doorstep, which is what my mom's family had when they were younger.

You can't read their captions, but the
first picture is the family farm in Aurora, IL
in the early 1900's.  The second is the first
home delivery team in the early 1900's.
The third is the first Oberweis dairy
plant in Aurora, IL.

After ordering our dessert, we sat down at a little table near the front window of the store.  When our order came out, our ice cream was served in the classic glass dishes that make you think of sweet shoppes like the one in The Music Man.

The glass to the right of the mint
chocolate chip cone is what mom's
chocolate shake was :)

Mom's chocolate shake was in a similar old fashioned glass.  After tasting it, she said it was definitely a family-made shake, made with milk just like she used to drink when she was a girl.  My brownie twist ice cream, Ben's birthday cake ice cream, and Dad's black cherry ice cream were all equally delicious, and we will definitely be going back to Oberweis any time we're in the mood for ice cream. :)

Another exciting part of today was that Dad was mentioned in an article in the St. Louis Business Journal.  St. John's Mercy Hospital, where he works, just announced today that they will be replacing the current Washington, MO hospital with a brand new one in the next few years.  Many new doctors will be hired, and when they mentioned that some had already been hired, Dad was the only doctor listed in the article.  He was pretty excited, and we were all so proud of him.  He's really enjoying his new job, and it's given him many new opportunities to expand the program there and teach some of the others new techniques and care skills.

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2011/07/01/mercy-to-spend-236m-on-new-washington.html

So today was another great day getting settled into our new life up here. :)