It all seems so long ago already.

We're with you every day, watching you grow and change, learning about, with and through you. We have constant and tangible contact. There's a great deal we still don't know, but we're able to watch with our eyes and somehow even the intangibles become very concrete.

Things weren't that way while you were still a fetus. Not able to see you, and inexperienced in the wonders of pregnancy, everything was hidden - not only from our sight but from our comprehension as well. We had to do an awful lot of guessing. Numerous books about pregnancy and about your growth within the womb were always within reach. They helped us form a picture of what was happening by you. They were informative and fascinating, but fortunately, they still left a great deal to our imagination.

By the tenth week of pregnancy, even though you were still almost insignificant in size, the books told us that some of the most fascinating aspects of your growth were already behind you. An important opportunity to establish contact seemed to be slipping away. Still, it was only then that I began to feel that there was any validity in writing you. Not that I thought that you could read, but by this time we were becoming intensely aware of your existence, and were even allowing ourselves to picture you well into the future, not as a fetus hidden away from us, developing almost secretly, but as a real entity with whom we'd be able to truly interact.

So I wrote you weekly communiques.