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This is being posted
on Eitan's 11th birthday - ten years after I first presented a printed
(or actually, photocopied) edition of these pages to Tzippi.
The pages were then organized as a booklet, photocopied on both
sides of the carefully arranged pages so that it really looked like
a book (with a couple of staples well-placed in the folded middle
to hold it together). It was, to my mind at least, a well produced
example of low-end desk-top publishing: I used the computer (or
more precisely, the word processor) for what it could readily service
me, and the rest I produced with scissors and glue.
This ten-years-later edition is a minimalist translation. HTML and
the web present me with numerous possibilities for presenting this
differently, but I've purposefully chosen to keep to the basics.
The text and the pictures are what's important, not the experience
of clicking through them. These pages are also, in keeping with
the original, in black and white. Back then, that was what was available
to me. Today it seems somewhat out of place, but again, this is
a reproduction of an old project.
Much has changed since this was written and first "published".
Eitan doesn't enjoy being reminded he was once a baby, and Nadav
and Hila are well beyond that stage as well. I tried to prepare
something special for their births as well, but I quickly discovered
that the amount of free time available to me with small children
around dwindled greatly.
There is no Hebrew translation of these pages, and for the forseeable
future none is on the agenda. I was fluent in Hebrew back then as
well, but even though I speak to Eitan almost solely in Hebrew,
writing to him as a fetus in English was what came naturally. And
translating this is a difficult chore - the English reflects a world
of associations that would demand too many changes in the transition
to Hebrew.
The drawings are by Zohara Dekel whom, more than six years
later, we still miss greatly.
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