If you were to ask me about the lowest point of my life as a parent, I could pinpoint it almost to the day. It was in early March 2021. The United Kingdom was a couple of months into its third and longest COVID lockdown. I had been living in the country for more than a year, but having arrived just a few months before the outbreak, I still felt like a stranger in town. My kids were 2 and 3 years old, and my youngest was going through a screaming phase. I was overwhelmed, depressed, and crushingly lonely. Something had to change. 'Household mixing' was, at the time, strictly prohibited. But tucked into the lockdown guidelines was a provision allowing parents to form a child-care bubble with one other family. So I sent a message to a WhatsApp group of local parents I'd been added to, asking if anyone was interested in forming such a bubble. Mercifully, a couple took me up on the offer'and they happened to live around the corner. Like us, they'd recently moved from the United States...
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