If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? It’s one of those questions that pops up as an ice breaker in awkward social settings. My answer is always at the ready: ice cream! And in a recent and not-quite-scientific study, 80% of participants (four out of five people in my nuclear family) agreed, sharing my unmelting devotion. Sawyer, my 19-year-old outlier, would take a baked good over a chilled sweet treat any day (and every day). But my youngest, Wilder? Well, the scoop doesn’t fall far from the cone.

At the very beginning of last summer as I looked ahead to hectic weeks of juggling Wilder’s camp schedule with my own work schedule, I felt overwhelmed — and a tad bit guilty that he’d be shuffling from camp to camp. I decided to give us something to look forward to every Friday afternoon, ending the week on a sweet note.

“What if we spend the summer taking an ice cream tour of Greensboro?” I ask 6-year-old Wilder one June afternoon. “Every Friday, we could chill at a new spot in town?”

“Yes!” he emphatically answers. “I love ice cream!” Not that I thought I’d have to twist his arm.

While I am a Leo who lives in typical creative chaos, my rising sign is a Virgo — meaning, I love a good spreadsheet. I get to work right away making a Google Sheet listing all of the local ice cream shops I can think of; plus, I hit up friends for recommendations and, of course, ask the all-knowing internet.

We begin our journey with a brand-new shop we’ve never been to on Battleground called Ice Cream Factory. Wilder orders a scoop of superman — a swirl of bright red, yellow and blue. If I told him it was entirely fruit flavored, including strawberry and banana, he’d never eat it. But, marketed as a comic book hero, he’s all in. Meanwhile, I pair key lime with raspberry roadrunner — a heavenly combination that tingles my palate. A shelf in the back is piled high with all sorts of games and puzzles. Long after our spoons have scraped the last of our treats from our cups, we spend an hour-and-a-half playing Trouble, Connect Four and cards.

In the car on the ride home, I ask, “What did you think of that place?”

It’s not technically a factory, he informs me in a tone of total authority, “but I guess they liked the name Ice Cream Factory. If it was a factory they would have machines that made the ice cream there and they would have robot arms that gave you the ice cream.” I stifle a giggle.

“OK, so, on a scale of one to five stars, how many stars would you give it?”

He pauses in serious contemplation. “Five stars.” Turns out, there’s no point deduction for the lack of robots.

At Yum Yum, a Greensboro staple since 1906, Wilder orders birthday-cake-flavored ice cream. After he’s finished every last melted drop, he announces, “I like superman better.” We’d committed to trying new-to-us flavors at each spot and it isn’t lost on Wilder that Yum Yum has its own superman flavor on the menu, which, clearly, he wishes he’d been able to order. Yum Yum, in Wilder’s highly calculated opinion also earns a five-star rating “because the place is pretty cool and it has a good name.”

At Maple View in Gibsonville, lured by its vibrant rainbow colors, Wilder orders a sherbet. It’s too sour for his tongue, he tells me. Funny, that doesn’t stop him from eating it all and awarding the shop five stars. Why? “It’s a really great place,” he says, “but not good ice cream.” I think he was also a big fan of the huge chocolate ice cream cone in the window.

Our summer Fridays continue on like this, visiting Ozzie’s, Homeland Creamery and everywhere in between, Wilder doling out five stars to almost every institution. Well, except for Cook-Out, where he ordered a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup shake and discovered he didn’t like big chunks of anything — even milk chocolate and sugar-laden peanut butter — interfering with the uninterrupted delivery of ice cream through the straw into his mouth. “Three stars,” he pronounces gravely. I explain that Cook-Out shakes are meant to be eaten with a spoon sometimes, but he’s not having it. Meanwhile, my 18-year-old, Emmy, and I gleefully gorge ourselves on our mint Oreo shakes, while my husband, Chris, gulps down his Butterfinger.

Turns out, if you do your research, there are enough five-star ice cream shops in the area to fill an entire summer’s worth of Fridays — and then some.

While we aren’t repeating the tour this summer, two new shops have since opened, plus we’re always up to sprinkling in repeat stops. And the cherry on top is that, this time, I don’t give a lick what he orders and how many stars he doles out. Because, as it turns out, it’s not about the ice cream at all. It never was. It’s about freezing a moment in time between a mom and her son.