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. Well, this is risky business. Oh, God, I've just realized what I've done. I thought, right, in order to record the intro to this week's podcast, I'll quickly give something to two-year-old Mickey to keep him happy while I chat. And in the big boys' rooms, we've got all these little boxes. You know, like there's little kid's suitcases, and they've all got different toys inside.

And I by accident I've given him the one filled with Lego men.

And I don't mean like a couple.

I mean like maybe like 300 in a little box.

Yeah, Mickey, we can't play that game.

He wants to just chuck them over the banisters.

This is a disaster.

I am home with all of my kids because last week, two of them came down with COVID.

Would you believe it, it was also the week I was scheduled to talk to my guest this week,

which is Dr. Catherine Green.

Now, Dr. Catherine Green, she is one of the people on the team who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine.

So I was always going to say thanks to her anyway, because it's the shock that I've had and my mum's had and lots of

folk in my family and my friends, but also, yeah, now I can say thank you again, because we basically

have managed to get through this virus in our house under our roof, highly contagious virus,

very, very quickly and smoothly with no one getting

too ill and Richard didn't get it at all, which is amazing. So anyway, so I'm a bit

distracted with the bloomin Lego men going down the stairs. But yes, she was so lovely.

So she and Dame Sarah Gilbert,

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