I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things about being a child-free person is that you get to spend a lot of time

with friends and their children.

It's a gift to watch kids grow up and change and go from weird little humans to weird

larger humans.

What impresses me is always how patient and kind my friends are with their children.

How they set healthy boundaries and keep good routines and always encourage them to talk

about feelings.

I don't know if I would have been that kind of parent, but maybe?

I hope so.

Last summer, we had friends come by with their two children, and the young boy loved

the blow-up pool we have on our patio during the hot Kentucky summer months.

He spent all day in the pool, and when his parents went to run errands and dropped their

daughter off at a friend's house, I sat by the pool and made up a game for him.

He loves puzzles and he's wicked smart, and so we decided to have a game where he guessed

all the ingredients in a variety of foods, Doritos, Capri Sun, Popsicles, and so forth.

He'd float on one of the long floaties, and I'd ask him what he thought the first ingredient

was, and he'd say, it's got to be high-fruit toast corn syrup, and we'd laugh and laugh,

because he got so good at it that he'd say things like, well, it's natural coloring,

so I don't know, turmeric, and he'd be right.

I loved this game because in some ways we were just goofing off, and in some ways he was

learning about how many ways our food has been processed and puffed up with an unholy

...