April 18, 2020 Update

 Hi everyone,

We hope you're all doing well! Life is great here in Provo. Our natural inclination towards introversion makes us very well-suited to a life of quarantine and limited social interaction. :) 

Nathan is in the middle of finals week (he is actually studying right at this moment). His last day of finals is on Wednesday, and then he is done for the semester! He will be taking a religion class during spring term since it is all online, enabling him to continue the class even when we move to Texas partway through spring term. That has been nice, because otherwise he would have had to wait until fall or look into the Independent Study options, which cost extra money. It will also be nice for him to have some more free time before his internship starts, and he is looking forward to playing with our new Xbox that we bought recently... #stimuluscheck. 

I have been teaching online since March 16, and will continue doing that through the end of the school year now that the governor and state superintendent have made that decision. While I certainly miss seeing my students in person every day, I can't deny that working from home has been a lot more comfortable and convenient. My team teachers and I plan together on Google Meet and split up the load of recording video lessons, which makes the workload very manageable. I do "office hours" on Zoom every day so that students who need help or have questions can get on and have real-time interaction with me. I have one student who gets on my office hours almost every day and just wants to chat with me for the full hour, so we've had to establish some boundaries haha. Things are going really smoothly overall. It is definitely a bummer to finish out my first year of teaching in this unexpected way, but we're making the best of it! I also love all the extra time I have to read,and have been doing so voraciously. I ordered a Kindle as a graduation gift (thank you, Mom and Dad!) and am super excited to use that to access Provo Library's online digital collection while the physical building is closed, and also while we're in Texas. 

This coming Thursday would have been my graduation ceremony from BYU. Instead, the McKay School of Education asked each graduate to send in a picture and a 15-second video expressing our gratitude and goodbyes. The pictures and videos, along with other content, will all be featured on a website that will go up on Thursday. I'll send out the link for anyone who wants to check it out. I am also happy to announce that I officially PASSED my Teacher Work Sample project that I turned in about two weeks ago, so now I feel like a real graduate! :) My parents and Josh came to visit a couple of weeks ago to celebrate my graduation, since they had been planning to come out for the ceremony before it got cancelled. We had a lot of fun with them while they were here. 

Our baby girl seems to be doing well. I felt what may have been movements a couple of times, but I'm not convinced that's what I actually felt. It's probably wishful thinking more than anything. I have an anterior placenta, which means it is attached to the front of the uterus and cushions the baby's movements, making them harder to feel this early on. I'm sure that in the next few weeks as she keeps getting bigger, I will be able to feel her move a lot more though. We are just grateful that our anatomy scan went well and that everything looks normal and healthy. ♥  

We haven't heard any updates about Nathan's internship, so unless anything changes, we are still planning on being in Dumas, Texas for the summer. We hope that the coronavirus situation doesn't change that, because it will be an amazing opportunity for Nathan. We will leave Provo on Thursday, May 28 and spend that night in Colorado with Mom and Dad (since it is conveniently right on the way!), and then finish the drive the next day. 

We haven't been taking a lot of pictures lately, so I was looking through my photos and grasping at straws. If you didn't see, there was a big "first photo" challenge that was going around on Instagram where couples posted their first photo taken together. I had way too much fun going back through my old mission photos to find Nathan's and my first pictures together, so I'll attach a couple here. ;)  

I think that's about all from us! We love and miss you all! 

Love,

Amy and Nathan