Hello, I'm Sophia Lusbexter and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work.

I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself.

Being a mother can be the most amazing thing,

but can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions.

I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything.

Welcome to spinning plates.

Hello, how are you? I am recording this from my kitchen and I'm going to make myself a cup of tea while I talked to you about my first podcast episode. What strange times we are living in. I started recording the podcast just before

lockdown. I think it was maybe a fortnight before. And it's funny to think back to that time now

because we sort of knew that things were probably not going to stay as they were. But I remember when I went

round to chat to Fern Cotton, who is the first person in the podcast series. And I remember when

I went around to her house and we had this funny thing of, do we shake hands, do we hug? And we

actually still hugged because at that point, there wasn't big signs saying don't hug everybody.

It was kind of peripheral vision.

And then things went very fast, didn't they?

From being, you know, normal life to lockdown life.

So now here I stand in my kitchen.

And truth be told, as is befittingly sort of ironic for someone who's recording a

podcast about how you make your work life and your home life mix, I've really struggled to get

very much work down at all. I think I went into a sort of paralysis of not really finding I could

be very creative or motivated. And anyway, I wanted to get on and release the podcast because even

though currently everybody's work, life, home life has gone all topsy-turvy, we will get

back to normal one day. And anyway, it's still fascinating to me how people are making things work.

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