Christmas Letter 2021

 

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.”

2 Timothy 1:7 (CSB)

Greetings from the Watts family! We hope your 2021 has been happy, safe, and healthy. This year has been full of changes and adjustments for our family, as I’m sure it has been for yours.

Adam turned thirteen in January and celebrated with a Zoom birthday party so he could play video games with his friends. Also, he was selected as “Student of the Month” by his teachers for being the student who most embodied that month’s character quality which was “joy.” Students can only receive this honor once during their whole time at Valor Voyager Academy. We are particularly proud of Adam for receiving this honor during distance learning, which was filled with new challenges, for teachers, students, and parents. 

“We” finished the rest of seventh grade in distance learning. It was certainly a team effort. In many ways, it was a sweet time for our family. We had more time with each other, and we persevered through a difficult challenge together. Our mornings were more relaxed, and we didn’t have to spend time in the car going back and forth to school. I reflected on our experience on the one year anniversary of distance learning in March, and you can read that here. Adam was able to return to in-person learning for eighth grade in August.

Also in August, Patrick’s grandfather, Col. H. A. Waggener, Jr. (Ret.), passed away after complications following a fall. He was 101 years old. We have many treasured memories of Pop, and we rejoice that he is now with his Savior, whom he loved and served so faithfully throughout his life. Pop kept a piece of paper in his cockpit during World War II with 2 Timothy 1:7 written on it. Despite the many combat and health-related challenges that he faced, Pop lived a long, full life, and we thank God on every remembrance of him. Even when a loved one so dear lives over a century, it seems there is never enough time spent together.

Patrick was able to work from Ohio during several trips there this year before and after Pop’s passing. He continues working from home, as all of Lifeway’s employees do now, with a few in-person gatherings during the year. Lifeway’s online products have remained a top priority in 2021 as churches navigate life with COVID-19. He works on several projects including Ministry Grid, events registration, Lifeway Worship, and online Bible study curriculum. He also serves on a task force that is helping the entire organization migrate to Microsoft 365.

Following my diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis last year, I (Lydia) continue to work with my doctors to slow the progression of the disease and find relief for my other chronic pain conditions. Patrick and Adam are very patient caregivers. I enjoy doing small crafting and baking projects at home when I am able and try to rest when possible. 

We hope your year has been a good one, and we are grateful to have so many wonderful friends and family members. We wish you a very merry Christmas, and a happy and healthy 2022.

-Patrick, Lydia, and Adam Watts 

Christmas Letter 2020

 When upon life's billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

- Johnson Oatman, Jr.

  Greetings from the Watts family! I (Lydia) have been thinking about the hymn, “Count Your Blessings” recently and how it applies to 2020. This year has had more than its share of discouragement, and we have been trying to counter that with gratitude for our many blessings.

  In February, Patrick was able to travel to Ohio to celebrate his grandfather’s 100th birthday. Pop wanted to go to his favorite Mexican restaurant and wear the birthday sombrero while the wait staff sang to him, so that’s what they did! Pop is still in his retirement community and has wonderful caregivers - people who also cared for Patrick’s grandmother before she passed away in 2019. Pop says he’s the only person he’s ever known who has lived to be 100! He has health issues that are to be expected with someone of his age, but he remains in good spirits. We are thankful.

  Not long after Patrick returned from Ohio, the case numbers of COVID-19 started to rise both here in Tennessee and around the country. On March 11, when Patrick picked Adam up on the last day of school before spring break, Adam told him that the teachers had all the kids clean out their cubbies. Patrick said, “I don’t think they’re going back.” He was right. Adam finished his sixth grade year in distance learning and has been home for all of seventh grade so far. His teachers have adapted amazingly well and have worked hard to deal with the numerous technological challenges of online learning. Adam is making good grades and likes his teachers. We are thankful.

 

That same week, on March 13, LifeWay did an “experiment” with all employees working remotely for a day. They had had a flexible “Work from Anywhere” policy in the past, but this was the first time no employees reported to the building. The experiment was a success, and Patrick has been working from home ever since. Overall, it has worked out well. We’ve saved lots of money on gas, and Patrick has been available to help with school-related tech problems and fix lunch! We are thankful.

  As churches cancelled services and activities, LifeWay made getting “distance-worshipping” resources to churches a top priority. Patrick was part of a team tasked with getting four curriculum lines completely online as quickly as possible. It's hard to explain what a monumental task this was, but they figured out how to make it happen. I even got to preview some of it and add my input! 2020 vastly accelerated bringing "salvation to the ends of the earth" via the internet. I believe that God has Patrick at LifeWay for such a time as this. We are thankful.

  In August of this year, I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that affects the spine. This came after a long journey to determine the cause of my back pain. Getting this type of diagnosis during a pandemic is not ideal, but we are in close proximity to excellent medical care and God continues to provide for our needs to manage the situation. We are thankful.

  One of the greatest blessings of 2020 for our family was the safe arrival of our niece, Emma. Patrick’s sister Allison and her husband Dave welcomed her in April. Big sister Abby is almost five years old and loves spending time with baby Emma at home in Texas. Even when things are discouraging around us, seeing pictures of them always brings a smile. We are thankful.

  Like many families this year, being at home together all the time has had its share of challenges and blessings. We realize that we are fortunate to have more time with Adam during such a pivotal time in his development as a young man. He’s grown at least half a foot in 2020, and his voice has dropped at least an octave. We have been trying to make the most of this unexpected period in our family life. We have all that we need, and we have each other. We are thankful.

  We hope that you are in good health and staying safe this holiday season as we celebrate the birth of our Savior. We are so grateful for our friends and family, and we hope that we will soon be able to see you in person again. We wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

-Patrick, Lydia, and Adam Watts

2017 Watts Family Year Ender

Dear friends and family,

We hope you have had a great 2017 and are looking forward to the new year. We’ve had lots of ups and downs this year in the Watts family.

Patrick and Adam have made several trips to see family this year, including a Spring Break trip to Texas and three trips to Ohio to see Patrick’s grandparents, who just celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. Their Memorial Day trip included stops at Dinosaur World in Kentucky and Kings Island near Cincinnati.

In June, they went to CentriKid camp in Campbellsville, KY. This was a new experience for both of them, and they had a blast!

We had the amazing experience of being in the “line of totality” of the solar eclipse on August 21. Patrick’s cousin, Ray, is an astronomy professor and came to observe the eclipse in our driveway. It was a fantastic learning experience for all three of us and especially for Adam, who wants to be an astronomer when he grows up.

In October, Adam came down with what we thought was a bad cold, but he was soon diagnosed with pneumonia. After a week of treatment at home, our pediatrician sent us to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital at Williamson Medical Center for an in-patient stay to get IV antibiotics. Adam responded more quickly than expected to treatment there, and we were sent home at the end of our second day. This happened during Adam’s fall break, and so he had quite the story to tell when he went back to school. Unfortunately, Patrick then came down with it... followed shortly thereafter by Lydia as well, but we both managed to avoid the hospital. We are grateful to live in Nashville with great medical care. All of October and most of November were consumed with illness, and so we got a little behind on Christmas preparations and cards.

Also in November, Patrick’s office moved to LifeWay’s new building in the Capitol View development in Nashville’s “North Gulch”. Nashville is growing by leaps and bounds, and the area around the new building is surrounded by new businesses and residential buildings. The new, high-tech building is a big change from the aging buildings on the old campus, but many of the architectural elements were incorporated into LifeWay’s new home. Patrick continues to work on web-based projects including a training site for church planters with the North American Mission Board.

Adam is a fourth grader this year, which in our school district, is the last year of elementary school. We have been looking at our options for middle school next year and are prayerfully considering what will be the best fit for him and our family.





We enjoy everyone’s Christmas cards and greetings. Even if we aren’t able to see you in person, our family and friends are always close to our hearts. We would love to hear from you. We pray you will have a happy and healthy new year.

-Patrick, Lydia, and Adam Watts

2015 Year in Review

Well, it's been a year since I've posted, so I've not kept up with my promise to myself to blog more, but I will try harder in 2016.

Adam
Adam will be eight years old in January. He is in second grade and enjoys science and reading. He did several day camps over the summer including two at the Adventure Science Center and Music Arts Camp at church.

Patrick
Patrick is preparing to move his office to a temporary location while LifeWay's new headquarters is built. The new building will be located in the "North Gulch" area of downtown Nashville and will be finished sometime in 2017. He is working on several projects at LifeWay including an app for a new series of Veggie Tales books and MinistryGrid. He played keyboard for Oak Hill School's production of Jungle Book in November. He continues to help with the streaming video ministry at church.

Lydia
Due to my health issues, most of my time is spent at home. I enjoy craft projects when I am able, especially for our new niece who is due to arrive anytime. I love staying connected with friends via Facebook and would welcome visitors if you are ever in the area. Check out our Facebook pages for videos and pictures!

looking up

Thanksgiving Pictures

We had a great Thanksgiving at Allison and Dave's new house in Kennesaw, GA. Patrick's parents drove in from Texas, and his grandparents came from Ohio. Dave's parents flew in from California, and so we had five states represented. Patrick and I got to go to Ikea on Friday BY OURSELVES! Adam didn't particularly want to nap very much, and we were all pretty tired when we got home Saturday evening. We were so glad we had the van both for comfort and for hauling all the equipment into the baby-free zone.

Thanksgiving 2008

the lifeway worship project

Whenever someone has asked me what I've been doing for the past couple of years, I've wanted to show them this video... but it didn't exist until now! Enjoy:


LifeWay Worship Project from Patrick Watts on Vimeo.

not-so-master craftsman

Ever since I was about four, I have had this fascination with the idea of "doing it yourself." As soon as I could read, I was picking up Dad's Reader's Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual and discovering what a "sump pump" was, what the most common dimensions were for dimensional lumber, and reading the step-by-step plans for building everything from a deck to a racecar bed. As a result, my first instinct is to do it myself. The frugal part of me thinks that by affording no outlay of capital for labor expenses, I can end up ahead.

So, last week when Lydia's side of the closet fell down, my "yourself" kicked into gear. Insipired by Jason's long-term projects, I even installed SketchUp and attempted to draft a concept for a built-in replacement closet for Lydia, designed exactly to match the clothes she wanted to put there and last until the house comes down. I was all ready to go with this plan until this morning.

I woke up at 4:30 as usual, but incredibly, Adam was still asleep, so I hopped on to the Lowe's site to start my shopping list for the day. I had even planned out how I was going to ask them to cut the plywood so I could fit it into the trunk of the car. And then, "just for inspiration," I thought, I checked out the Home Organization section.

Well, it turns out that the fine folks at ClosetMaid have come up with a few shortcuts for rebuilding your collapsed closet. To make a quickly-becoming-arduous story short, when Adam woke up about 5:30, we had a bottle and diaper changed, and then the two of us went to pick out what is now in our closet. (Side note: if you bring an almost-eleven week-old to Lowes at six in the morning saying, "we're going to fix up mommy's closet," you get an extremely high "awwwwwwwwww" response.)

I bet at this point in the story, Jason is screaming at his computer Mac, "you sellout! have you no integrity!? you even learned a level of CAD to do this!"

In any do-it-yourself project, you have several factors going...

• money
• quality
• pride
• time

I'm sure there are more. Here's my take on how plan A (hardcore build it yourself) stacked up against plan B (what I ended up doing.)

	Plan A	Plan B
money	Although the material cost for Plan A was less than plan B, I didn't have the right tools to get the job done. One of the reasons that anything is manufactured in a factory is economy of effort - they have the tools to get the job done and the materials to do it with.
quality	I think I had a good plan for the closet on my own, but it was untested. And, as stated before, the tools I had at my disposal may not have made it the quality that I would have hoped for.	I'm very pleased with the result, and while the workmanship of the product may not have the quality desired, the usefulness of the end result is high quality.
pride	Had I done plan A, I'm sure the pride factor would have been humongous... as long as everything worked out.	Doing it this way still gives me pride in the accomplishment, if not the product.
time	There's no way I would have been able to measure, cut, sand, paint, fit, attach, test, finish and refill the closet in a day.	I was done with construction at 9:45 this morning, and when the touch-up paint finished drying at 11:00 a.m., it was ready to move in.

The navel-gazing takeaway of the whole experience is that as of ten weeks and six days ago, my hierarchy of needs has shifted. The last item on the list was the trump card, having the chance to spend 80% of my day being available for Lydia and Adam instead of measuring twice and cutting once.

mom, dad and baby are doing great...

Just so you know... we're doing great! We'll tell the whole story soon, once we get more into the rhythm of change, eat, sleep, change, eat, sleep.

Suffice it to say, we actually made it to Sunday School yesterday morning, and Adam arrived at 12:39... do the math!

God has truly blessed us with a healthy, happy baby boy.