Too Peas in a Podcast live show in Canberra

Posted on 23 May, 2022

If you know these two podcasting dynamos and all-round awesome women, you know.

And if you don’t, then let us introduce you. You will be so glad we did.

Kate Jones and Mandy Hose, each the parent of twins with disabilities, started their podcast on 30 May 2019, thinking it would be for just their small network of friends and maybe a few extra.

Until one day Annabel Crabb tuned in and spread the word on her own Chats10looks3 podcast.

Annabel loved the way these friends laughed (and sometimes) cried and managed to negotiate their family lives with good grace and particular humour. The chemistry was hard to deny.

And so Too Peas in a Podcast took off like a rocket.

Over the past three years, the podcast has been downloaded over 2,000,000 times across the world with an average of more than 20,000 individual listeners per week. Their audience quickly expanded to include teachers, health professionals, therapists and more and is revolutionising the way people think about disability and inclusion.

And for the first time, Mandy and Kate are coming to Canberra—due to demand and bit of gentle persuasion from local fans.

“Our Canberra tribe nagged us and so we are coming!” says Kate.

Kate said it would be a wonderful chance for the podcast fans to meet and mingle with “like-minded souls”.

And for some of the mothers of kids with disabilities who would be attending, it would “take an enormous amount of organisation and wrangling to get there”. Kate and Mandy were confident they would love the night.

“Our audience is actually quite broad now, and obviously mums relate, but we also attrat women who are not mothers and members of the LGTBQI community and really anyone who feels ‘othered’”.

In a show entitled “Where are the Scissors” Mandy and Kate will unpack self-care, self-help and the myth of the super mum, bringing with it their signature laid back and hilarious approach to life. And there will even be a special guest appearance by Canberra local, Jude, the Singing Pea!

Since sharing their inner voices with eachother and their audience, Mandy and Kate have been nominated for Australian of the Year, and finalists for Victorian of the Year,. They have written and published The Invisible Life of Us, a book that shares their own stories on navigating life when you are the parent of a child with disability, created Letters to You, a booklet of hope for parents just receiving a diagnosis, and created BeansTalk, a spin-off podcast devoted to fathers with children of disability.

But the best part of all of it has been celebrating the challenges and achievements of hundreds of (extra)ordinary Peas and their children from around Australia and the world.