My name is Matt, so I'm eight years old. My favorite color is blue.

Hi, I am Nora. I am six years old, and my favorite food is cake.

I know those voices pretty well. They're Max and Nora, the son and daughter of one of our senior health producers, Nadia Kunang.

Can I say something?

We wanted to hear a kids perspective on the pandemic.

I think it was awful. Some business actually closed down. Some restaurants closed down day like.

So I feel like it was awful.

As for Max, he told us he's ready for life to get back to normal, so we asked him what he was most excited about.

Me and my friends that I met in school. I don't like to play with like every day.

It's not just Max and Nora. The pandemic has upended family life in ways that were simply unimaginable 18 months ago.

Parents are juggling remote work and homeschooling and essential workers have worried about bringing the virus home to their families every night.

Others lost their jobs. They're now struggling to make ends meet. But no matter what situation you're in, we've definitely all had some pretty tough days.

And now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I think it's important to think about what we learned over the last very stressful year.

What we learned about our kids, about ourselves, about the parents we want to be going forward as we start chasing life.

No one can prepare you to raise a child during a pandemic. Think about it. There's no playbook for this sort of thing.

We asked you to share your stories of parenting this past year and a half. And you had a lot to say. These were some powerful responses.

The day I gave birth, my husband was the only person allowed with me. The first time I held my son, I was wearing a mask.

I had a six year old. He is a kid who loved school. But when everything kind of happened with this pandemic and we went to Zoom, he did not like it.

There was lots of tears shed by both of us. He just is not a computer guy.

My husband and I are raising a middle school boy and a toddler girl. And we're doing so without any family or close friends for hundreds of miles.

It's been incredibly challenging because we're black. And the degree of hate our community has experienced over the past 18 months has been heartbreaking.

I'm a single parent and I have four children. So I was totally dependent on my neighbors so I could go to work every day and just keep my roof over our heads and keep my job.

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