An update of the children’s classic, “The Wheels on the Bus,” our film is a love letter to “real” parenting seen through the lens of imperfection and struggle. We open on a baby playing piano, her mom prone on the floor. A couple soothes screaming twins. Parents of all stripes try to sleep, to work from home, to shop with kids. As the lyrics escalate, we see the level of difficulty increase: meltdowns, laundry, pumping while on a conference call, until a critical moment of surrender (and relief) happens when a (trans) dad runs a simple, soothing bubble bath that calms down kids and parents together so they can once again feel what it’s all about – perfectly imperfect families just getting through the day. Shot in a real but beautiful docu style, the film touches what’s real and true about the hardest, best job there is.

We don’t have guaranteed health care or childcare in the US. During the pandemic, things became untenable. Since February of 2020, women lost over 5.4 million jobs; parents had to become educators overnight; childcare became a luxury, as many parents-to-be suffered the extreme anxiety of Covid complicating their pregnancies. Meanwhile, Instagram overflowed with perfection: lunch recipes for homeschooled kids, pastel baby bedrooms, and professionally home-baked cakes that raised the unfair bar for all of us. We set out to make a film that reflected our lived experience: Directed by two working moms with a Latinx DP and an LGBTQ editor, with parent-writers and parent-crews, we filmed real families in their real homes to make something that not only demonstrated the solution, but actively and directly affected the cast and crew.

We are so proud of making something so intimate and joyful at a time of such isolation.

Directed by two working moms, this film came from deeply lived experience and from a loving and generous spirit for the “worst, best job” in the world: Parenting. The film is really a love letter to all of us who have found ourselves crying in a closet or eating food that someone else has already eaten, and spit out. It’s a love letter to poop, drool, diapers, temper tantrums, the absurdity, the chaos and the extreme, life-changing, cosmic love we have for our kids.

Casting real families with real kids, being in their homes and organizing the shoot around nap times was the only way to make this film-the whole crew had to switch to a parental hive mind to make it happen. They say never work with animals or children, but we discovered something else: when you honor families and children and accommodate their needs, it’s actually pretty incredible.