[The following was Glenn's 1993 Contribution to the Annual Christmas Newsletter of the Physics Department of Carleton College. Some obsolete references have been removed but it is otherwise unchanged.]
We have had a rough year because of the boys' problems, which I alluded to last December, but I think we are doing better now. We are able to manage Jamie's Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and he is doing very well in 1st grade. He has read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books and is the best reader in his class.
We are far more concerned about Thomas, who suffers from Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD). He is nearly 4 and only now beginning to talk. Yet even there we are more hopeful. He is responding to therapy from the specialists we are consulting. However, the cost, both psychic and financial, is enormous.
Problem: We have been told for at least a year that we needed to find a support group for these concerns. However, our schedules are so tight that we could not get to any normal group's meetings. Solution: Compuserve has an ADD forum, which includes a section on PDD and related disorders. Our support group is in our family room whenever we log on.
Our bank computing jobs continue to go well, although we are constantly juggling our schedules because of the boys. I am now working on a client server application using Omnis 7 for the local clients (both Macs and MS-Windows machines) and a Sybase SQL database server running on a Sun Sparcstation. Mia continues to work with TI's IEF code generator on IBM mainframes.
I still enjoy reading about physics and astronomy, when time permit. I have started taking Jamie to Chicago's Adler Planetarium, which he likes a lot.
Glenn McDavid, class of 1972.
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©1993, 2000 by Glenn T. McDavid.