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.