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Somewhere long ago and in a different life, I got a letter. My mom had written it for me years earlier to a future version of myself and sealed it away, waiting to give it to me.

I assume, all these years later, it was a graduation gift, a reflection on what I was and what she’d hoped I would be. In the dim remembrance of years gone by, I actually only remember a single sentiment: she’d envisioned that I’d be the talk of the lady folk.

Oh, the places I wasn’t.

But there’s a thing in that.

We’re at the end of week 15, days away from the 16th-week ultrasound and another month yet from learning the sex of our little Captain Fetus. But we’re clearly not too close to start affixing hopes to him or her.  Poor sod.

But I suspect this is a human predicament, and not necessarily a Johnson-family one.  After all, in response to our news of the baby, my dear friend Danny wrote:

Fatherhood from the outside appears to be a grand challenge, an event that tests one’s ability to raise a child who’s not an [idiot], who is happy and easy going, and, of course, one who I can live vicariously through as my own soul withers and dies.

Point being, there’s a lot of hope attached to children, even unborn ones. We hope they’ll be better than us, smarter than us, more successful than us.  And yet…we hope they’ll love the things we love, those things that give us joy, the things that make us…us. Really, I suspect we just want improved versions of ourselves to inhabit the earth.

And neither Terri nor I are particularly  immune.

Which is all a way of saying that this has been a week of hope and nostalgia and, if I’m being honest, this entire blog is building up to this: we’ve come up with a list of things that we hope our kid likes some day. I’ll love my kid no matter what –  in a way I truly never understood before now — but these…these are the things, in our heart of hearts, we hope our kid comes to love…

From Will

• Bad movies
• Short stories
• Fall
• Baseball
• Wilco
• Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends
• The Office (UK)
• The clang of aluminum masts in the morning
• Clever lyrics
• Bittersweet Endings

From Terri