The only problem is that I will not be able to move around the classroom and will have to teach these courses from behind the teacher’s desk. Our classrooms are not nearly big enough to accommodate enormous bellies moving around among seated students.

I have no idea how to teach language courses while sitting down. Normally, students do group activities while I walk among them and participate. What do I do if I can’t walk around? Sit behind the desk staring at the students mysteriously? Pretend to be busily searching something on the computer? Does anybody have experience of teaching while sitting down in courses where everything is based on group work or work in pairs?

I know some people do amazing work with teacher-centered language learning but I’m not one of those people, and this old dog is way too ancient to learn a bunch of completely new tricks between today and tomorrow. I just want something I can do while students engage in their activities and I just sit there like a monument to myself.

Guess who will be teaching 3 courses she never taught before, using a textbook she has never seen, based on the syllabi somebody else created, five times a week, in weeks 37, 38 and 39 of her pregnancy, interspersed with visits to the hospital for testing 3 times a week? And guess who is not in the least stressed out or bothered by the prospect?

Yes, that would be me.

Where did the ridiculous expression “to validate somebody’s emotions (or feelings)” even come from? I keep encountering it and it makes me cringe in vicarious shame to see people use it.

Come on, folks, even Dr. Phil made fun of the expression and dismissed it as meaningless psychobabble. Surely, you don’t want to be dumber than Dr. Phil’s intended audience. Your emotions are your own, and it is nobody’s business to proclaim them as valid or not. Nobody needs a permission to feel things.

Didn’t I tell you years ago that Julian Assange was an idiot? He has no confirmed my belief by suggesting that the only hope gore the US is to elect Rand Paul for president. Rand Paul and Ron Paul are politicians he admires deeply. I can’t link at this point but you will easily find the news through a web search.

I always said he was nothing but a silly airhead on the quest to become rich and famous. Trying to attach some progressive ideology to him is a waste of time. He is too silly to have an ideology which is why the favorite politicians of immature teenagers appeal to him.

I know I promised no pictures of the belly but I have got to post at least one where it is fully clothed.

Yes, it is very big. This would have been a C-section even if I hadn’t chosen it at the very beginning. And see the sausage-like fingers? And the haystack hair that I haven’t been able to comb through for two months?

I can’t tell you how much I want to get my body back. And to stop hiding in bathrooms with needles and weird paraphernalia like some drug addict.