Hell yes - far more fun! The time with my children is priceless, I will never get these years back and now I have experienced it all first hand and not through the eyes of a childminder. You never know Jouri, one day you may be lucky enough to have a bit more in your life than the PhD too

Oh dear Jouri, you don't need to guess, I can tell you for a fact - that compared to up to 2hrs travelling a day either end of an 8+hr day and putting my toddlers to bed in their clothes because they have fallen asleep in the car on the way back from the child minders - I would indeed say, with a very clear mind, this is a far better life for them. They are with me after school / nursery every day until they go to bed (so that is 25hrs a week of my time they have gained straight away). And I work until late into the evenings to compensate. I am in charge of my own schedule and it works very well for us indeed. I am sorry that your friends who you conducted your straw poll with are not as happy, but that is not necessary the case for everyone. Pheonix, don't let Jouri put you off, it can work and very successfully.

Tut tut Jouri, Can I ask if you speak from experience when you say that it will be no fun for anyone involved, i.e. do you have children who are suffering because of your PhD? If so perhaps you need to readjust your priorities.

Personally, I am in my final year, I have two very small children and a third on the way. My children get to spend far more time with me now than when I was pursuing my previous professional consultancy career (which incidentally paid more than 4 times my stipend). Now I flex myself around them and not the other way round. We have a far better work life balance than before, and everyone is much happier as a result. Financially it is tight, but we just had to recalibrate our expectations. In fact life is pretty damn good

You can do it - and you will do it, your hormones are crazy at the moment and coupled with her poorly worded advice she has made things worse. BUT She could have said nothing, let you take on the job and fall on your bum. In her own way, I think she cares.
Hope some/ any of this helps x

3)Your husband should support you more - she has worded this VERY badly, but what I think she is worried about is that your husband is inadvertently putting you under pressure to bring in some extra money and may think you are taking on the paid work as a result of this (I agree this may come back to her personal past experiences).
I am a 3rd yr PhD Mum of two (4yrs and 2yrs) and perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this as I know how much work the baby will take and how shattered you will be. I think she has put it badly but is trying to say - go all out on your PhD now to get as much done as you can before baby is here. Things are financially tight for us, but I just cannot take on any additional paid work at the mo (despite being offered some well paid consultancy) because I know the end of the PhD will just keep moving to the right. And I want to get it out of the way.

God - I hope I am not going to hang myself here, and I caveat the following with 'I wasn't there to hear the tone of the comments or see the body language', but I interpretted your supervisors comments in a slightly different light, as follows:
1)Choose between this and the PhD - sounds like she is aware of how much work it is going to take in this last bit and is worried that the paid work will disract you therefore don't split your time, try to focus on the PhD
2)You'll not complete the PhD - linked to the first one if you don't get most of the work out of the way before the baby arrives you will have very little time when it is here (she is right, I have been there)

Gosh Labmonkey, they haven't been very symapthetic on here so far have they!

The only advice I can give is to work out why you are doing this, what is the end goal?. Personally, mine is for a career change after spending 10yrs in industry and management consultancy I needed to make a different future for my family, so when I (regularly) get the dips of enthusiasm (read as boredom) I just go back to what is the purpose of doing this. I simply cannot go into lecturing without it -and if I want that as a career I must finish.
In my experience (and it is different for everyone) the PhD goes in peaks and troughs, good times and very bleak 'what is the point in it all times', without an end goal in sight / purpose to it all, the bleak times are very hard to work through. Don't know if any of this helps.

Verdy - I bought a headset from a company called Tamms direct on the internet, it was about £40 as I didn;t want to take any chances with the recognition being inaccurate, however a colleague of mine just uses the standard one and doesn't have any problems using it.

Rick - I use for interviews, it obviously only recognises my voice, but I just listen to the tape through the headset and repeat what the interviewee says back into the microphone, each time I lead it with the persons name, so I know who said what - not sure how this would work for your focus groups, depends how large a group I guess.

I have a plain middle English accent and have read (via reviews on Amazon) that it does not cope so well if you have a very strong accent. I would recommend reading these reviews, when I last read them they had been posted by by researchers from a variety of disciplines. Hope this helps.

I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.5, it is very easy to use and once loaded only takes about 5 minutes to train your voice. The accuracy is VERY good, there is also an accuracy centre for training any words it does not appear to recognise, very useful for me as there are a lot of sector / discipline specific acronyms in use in my work. I use it predominantly for interview transcription (listen to interview in headset and repeat into microphone) it has more than halved the time it was taking to transcribe HOWEVER....

Hi Freddy,

I am also at Bath and EPSRC funded. I get my susbsistance quarterly, so get 4 installments Jul, Oct, Jan, Apr it usually comes in the last week of the month before, i.e. I last got paid 25th June for Jul-Sept.
From memory, I got paid at the end of September when I started.
The fees get taken out directly.
Hope this helps