Hey, it's Anna. Last week, we released an episode about the many challenges of child care in America right now, with a child care provider whose centers are currently open, and a parent who's depending on one of those centers so she can go back to work.

But we've also heard from a lot of you who have not had access to child care for months and who have had to

make big changes in the way you're taking care of your kids. One of the people who wrote into us

is named Bill Army. He lives in Queens, New York, and he has two daughters. Before March 12th, 2020,

I was a Broadway actor. That was the day they closed the theaters. And now they're saying they won't be reopening them again until January, 2021, at the earliest.

I have a three and a half year old and a one year old. My wife of 11 years is an emergency medicine doctor.

Since she was doing and continues to do incredibly important work,

and since my industry was and continues to be shut down,

I became the full-time stay-at-home caregiver to our children,

which has been challenging because I never envisioned being a full-time stay-at-home dad.

My older daughter was used to leaving the house on a daily basis for nursery school before the pandemic,

and she was used to taking trips to the playground at the end of our block.

She was used to seeing friends and family weekly.

She was used to adventures to the zoo and rides on the subway. And all of that changed.

No school, no playground, no friends, just our apartment and our imaginations. So early on, I developed what I

began calling our field trips.

Basically, I would choose a place that we would pretend we were going, and then we would use all the arts and crafts and tools and cardboard at our disposal in order to make that destination seem real.

We pretended we were at the beach, so we wore bathing suits and sunblock and put on

sounds of the ocean on my phone. When we pretended we went camping, we roasted a marshmallow

over a bunch of tea lights in our living room, and I played sounds of the loons in the Adirondacks on my phone.

We did a carriage ride where we decorated my daughter's wagon and we hitched up their

rocking horse. We did a gondola ride. And in early June we did a protest. We took every stuffed animal and toy and car,

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