August 23, 2020 Family Update

 Hi family,

We hope everyone is doing well. Here is the last update from us before we become a family of three!

The plan is that we will be going into the hospital on Tuesday evening around 6:30 pm to begin ripening my cervix, and then they will start me on Pitocin the next morning. We are excited to meet our little girl and finally see and hold her after these many months of waiting! My parents are planning to drive out to spend a few days with us once we are discharged from the hospital (since the current policy is that I can have only one designated person with me and no visitors, although people can come look through the window from the outside of the hospital). We are excited to have them come out, and we are looking forward to having Cheryl with us starting on Labor Day weekend. We actually had a short visit from my parents this past week; they came to move my little brother Josh into his dorm room at Helaman Halls since that's a tradition they like to do when their kids start college. Josh is super excited to be a college student and we are loving all the time we get to spend with him! 

After our Balaich reunion in Colorado, we spent a few days at Bear Lake with my family (4 of the 7 kids came). We had a blast and enjoyed lots of lake time, shakes, burgers and french fries, and played fun games like One Night Werewolf, Psych and What Do You Meme. That was our last big trip for the summer. 

Nathan has been working on his research team every day, usually from 8 or 9 am until at least 4 pm, so he gets good hours and has stayed really busy. They even took a trip down to a power plant last week and did a lot of hands-on work there (I don't understand what they do very well - you'll have to ask him if you want more details). :) Meanwhile, I try to stay busy at home by indulging my nesting instincts and deep cleaning every random thing I can think of. Nathan has been helping me and it's been nice to get our house ready and cleaned for the new baby. 

I got tested for COVID today (I'm not sick, it's just hospital policy for women to get tested before delivery), so we will be self-isolating until we check into the hospital so that I don't risk getting exposed to the virus in the interim. Hopefully even though we're stuck at home, we'll be able to do some fun things during our last few days just the two of us. :) 

Nathan is signed up to take the GRE on September 26, so he will be studying for that along with looking into Chemical Engineering graduate programs that he wants to apply to. Most places have December or January as the deadline, so it will be a busy semester for him getting all those applications in, doing his classwork, and being a new dad. He is amazing and definitely up to the challenge! He takes great care of me and I know he'll do the same for our baby girl. 

I think that's about all from us. We will definitely keep you all posted on how things are going in the hospital. It'll be a big week for us, so we appreciate all the prayers and positivity you can send our way! ♥ 

Love,

Amy and Nathan 

Us on a hike we went on while at Bear Lake

On the beach at Bear Lake 

Nathan trying to use his belly as a shelf like I always do

A Brazilian dinner we made with Josh

My most recent (and last) weekly baby bump picture - thanks to Nathan for being my faithful photographer since week 14! 

Maternity photos

October 2019 Update

 Hello family,

We hope this email finds you well. I was going to let Nathan write the email this time, but he is feeling under the weather. The poor guy has already gotten sick three times this fall and somehow I've been lucky enough not to catch anything yet (*fingers crossed*). 

We just got off of a Skype call with my entire family because today is my Dad's 60th birthday. Since they are on their mission, they are celebrating in Bogota, Colombia! It was fun to see everybody on Skype and hear my parents' funny stories about life in South America. Nathan and I also decided to book plane tickets out to West Virginia for Christmas, so we will be there with my sister Carolyn and her family and my brother Rob from December 22-31. I have been wanting to go visit Carolyn's family for a long time, so it is a dream come true! 

Our most exciting news is that Nathan was offered a Summer 2020 internship with Valero's McKee refinery in Texas. He officially sent them his acceptance letter, so it looks like we'll be spending our summer in the-middle-of-nowhere, Texas. We are looking forward to this adventure and I am really proud of Nathan's hard work. 

I had my first round of parent-teacher conferences a couple of weeks ago, which went really well. The conferences followed a full day of school, so I didn't get home until about 9 pm that night and I was pretty wiped out the next day. Nathan was sweet enough to buy me Coke and Gushers (my favorite treats) and have them waiting for me when I got home. My school had a super cool assembly a few weeks ago where a famous YouTuber guy named Stuart Edge came and did some magic tricks and then these super crazy and talented BMX bike riders came and did a bunch of cool tricks. At one point, the BMX guys said they needed a teacher volunteer. All of my students started enthusiastically pointing at me, and the guy noticed and made me come up to the front. He told me to lay down and also called up a couple other teachers to lay down next to me, at which point the bikers jumped over us. It was scary but definitely earned me some cool points in the eyes of my students, so totally worth it. ;)

Nathan and I have both been keeping busy with work and classes, but we find time to do fun things together. Back in August, the professor I used to TA for at BYU came and visited me in my classroom after school and also gave me a Red Lobster gift card. So last week, Nathan and I decided to go out for a late-night dessert at Red Lobster and put the gift card to good use. We also attended the BYU Spectacular concert this past Friday night. One of the main performers was Ben Rector, who sings our wedding song (although sadly he did not sing it at the Spectacular). Hilary Weeks also performed along with the various BYU dance groups, Vocal Point and the dunk team. It was a great show! 

We are also excited for Halloween coming up soon. I will be dressing as one of the "Things" along with my 4th grade team since our school is doing a Dr. Seuss Whoville Christmas themed Halloween. Nathan and I also get to help the youth plan and run a Spook Alley for our ward Halloween party this coming Saturday, so hopefully that all turns out pretty cool. However, our favorite thing about Halloween is the candy, of course. Smith's had all their Halloween candy 50% off this weekend, and we spent way too much money on candy....so rest assured that we're still our usual, sugar-toothed selves. :)

We are so thrilled that Austin and Rhi will be moving closer next month! We love getting updates from you all and hope you have a great week! 

Love,

Amy and Nathan

P.S. The pictures are of Nathan holding a Red Lobster cheese biscuit and us at the BYU Spectacular at the Marriott Center. 

September 2019 Update

 Hey everyone!

Nathan and I are doing well. Friday was the end of my 4th week teaching, so it feels pretty exciting to have a whole month down. Some days are hard and a little overwhelming, but overall I am loving my job as a teacher. I constantly tell Nathan about "my kids" and I honestly love my students a lot. 4th grade is a fun age because they are old enough to tell me funny jokes and riddles and do things independently and have really good discussions in class, but they are also still young enough to be really sweet and eager to please. They love to be helpful. I have to remember to ask someone specific to do a favor for me, because if I just say, "Can someone turn off the light for me?" I have at least 5 kids sprinting over to the light switch. They constantly ask me "Can I erase the board for you?" or "Can I help you with ____?" One of the hardest things of teaching so far has been the fact that my school district adopted a new math program this year. That means that not only am I figuring out what I am doing, but the other teachers on my team are also figuring out how to use it. Besides that, I have one student who moved here from Mexico like a week before school started and speaks zero English. She and I can get by with our Portuguese/Spanish, but it's hard to know how to help her do the assignments the other kids do, or how to make accommodations for her. Luckily, my class has really taken her under their wing and lots of them have gone out of their way to become her friend, so she is doing great socially. Teaching has been a great adventure and I am excited to keep learning! 

Nathan seems to be enjoying his classes at BYU so far, although usually the most detail I get about them is "They're fine" or "They're normal" haha. I'll let him write a paragraph about his schedule and classes. 

Nathan here. I am taking 6 classes, 15.5 credits; Chemical Engineering safety/environment/ethics, Material Science, Physical Chemistry (we are learning about crystal structures and crystallography right now, Dad), Fluid Mechanics, Career Seminar, and Christ and the Everlasting Gospel. So my workload is pretty heavy this semester and will also be heavy next semester. But as Amy said, my classes are "fine" and "normal."

So, funny story. We started writing this email yesterday and were going to say that we don't have a lot of other updates and we both still have our same callings in YM/YW.....however, a few minutes later, we got a text from our ward secretary asking if we could meet with the bishop this morning. We have both now accepted new callings: Nathan, as 1st counselor in the YM presidency and Amy as YW president. So that's pretty scary and exciting. 

Although we have not been watering our garden as consistently as we used to, it has been producing lots of tomatoes, green beans, green peppers, zucchini, squash and more. We love getting to eat so many fresh vegetables and enjoy the fruit of our months of work. We also got passes to the Provo rec center so that we can be better at exercising regularly. I love going to the fitness classes that they offer there and Nathan enjoys playing basketball with random strangers and lifting weights. We even tried playing pickleball once, even though we didn't bother to look up any of the rules of the game before we went, so we basically just hit the ball back and forth. It's been fun and good motivation to work out more often! 

Yesterday, Nathan got to go to a stake primary activity that was for dads and daughters. I think most of you know about the Tardiolis, the Brazilian family in our ward who we have become close to. The parents are now separated and the dad isn't really in the picture, so Nathan filled in as a substitute "dad" so that Amanda, their 8-year-old daughter, could attend the activity. She had a blast with Nathan and it was really cute, so I'll attach some pictures. 

Sorry we're terrible at taking pictures...we'll try to take more in these next few weeks before it's our turn for the email update again. The other ones I attached are from when we hiked the Y with Justin over Labor Day weekend and when we visited Logan and Christi last Sunday. 

We love you all!

Nathan and Amy

July 5, 2020 Update

 Hello family,

 

The last couple months have been great for us. Here are a few of fun things that we have done:

1. Arches and Canyonlands camping with L&C - they already sent lots of pictures of that, it was fun. We will send a few more in another email.
2. Trip to Virginia for Amy’s sister’s (Laura) wedding – we drove to Laramie and picked up Amy’s siblings Josh and Maria on the way to DIA. Then we flew from DIA to the DC airport and drove to Blacksburg, VA. We got in on a Friday night, the wedding was on Saturday in an horticultural venue on Virginia Tech campus, and we began heading home on Monday. 
3. Trip to Laramie – we visited Amy’s family for fun. Since Amy’s parents are retired, we just hung out and watched movies and stuff. We taught them the chickenfoot domino game that Austin and Rhi taught us.
4. Amy’s brother Josh moved to Provo – since living with your retired parents isn’t all it’s hyped up to be, Josh decided to move down to Provo early to start working and enjoy the social aspects of being in a college town. We are excited to have him here.

 

Since Nathan’s internship was cancelled he was deciding between a couple professors for research opportunities. He ended up getting hired by Dr. Andrew Fry and works in a combustion research lab. There are several ongoing projects, but he is currently working on a project that is being funded by the Department of Energy to help improve the performance of a coal-fired power plant in Payson, UT. He is working with several other people to design and build a probe that they can use to gather air flow data from the inside of the flue-gas duct of the power plant. He enjoys this research since several of his friends from school are also working with him. With the loss of his internship, he is also considering grad school as a more viable option after his bachelors degree.

 

Amy is now 32 weeks pregnant and is starting to feel some of the not-so-fun side-effects of pregnancy. She often gets pretty bad heartburn, her hip has been hurting quite a bit, and she gets too hot to sleep at night. We have been remedying these side-effects with heartburn medication, reduced physical strain, and an intricate system of fans that carry air from the swamp cooler to our bed at night. However, these downsides are dim in comparison with the joy that we get from seeing and feeling baby Juliet (yes, we are pretty certain that her name will be Juliet) move around and kick Amy in the ribs. Amy is also now officially graduated after the University finally sent out her transcript. She has been spending lots of her time getting things ready for Juliet, but is also thinking about eventually teaching online English classes to Chinese children through a program called VIP Kid. Amy’s birthday is this Tuesday and we are gonna party like animals.

 

We had a fun 4^th of July double header on both Friday and Saturday. We had lots of yummy food, plenty of fireworks, and surprised Amy with a birthday cake. We are excited to see everyone in just over a week at the family retreat in Keystone and are thankful for Mom and Dad, and Jared and Jane (but mostly Jane, really) for paying for it!

 

We will send some pictures of a bunch of stuff. It will probably be in 2 emails.

 

Love,

Nathan and Amy

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

December 15, 2019 Update

 Hello family!

Sorry we dropped the ball on sending out an update last week. Here's what's new in our lives:

First, Maddie and James Empey (who were renting out the basement for the last year) just moved out yesterday. We posted the basement for rent on Facebook groups about a week ago and have spent the last week responding to tons of messages about it and giving people tours. Most of the people who came by were a little quirky and we were starting to get nervous about finding someone as awesome as the last two couples that have lived down there since we moved upstairs, but then this really nice couple came by and seemed really interested. Their names are Karla and Tyrell. We were already thinking they would be a good fit when we found out that Karla actually served in Logan and Christi's mission! They had great things to say about her, so that pretty much sealed the deal. Cheryl offered them the apartment and they accepted and are excited to start moving in soon!

Nathan took his first final yesterday and said it sucked, but he probably got like 100% because that's what usually happens. He has 4 more finals to take between Monday and Thursday this week, and then he is DONE! Well, for a couple of weeks at least. :) This has been one of his hardest semesters yet. During the last couple of weeks, we have barely seen each other because he has had a million group projects that kept him on campus well into the night. I am really proud of how hard he has worked and how well he has done. Nathan's a champ!

Amy is trying to survive the craziness that is teaching elementary school in December. It is very exciting, but students also seem to have forgotten every procedure that they ever learned and drive her nuts some days. She took a Drama class at BYU and her teacher shared a readers' theater script with her for the classic Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol. Her class is going to perform it for the other classes and the students' parents, with costumes, props and everything. The kids are stoked about it! That has been really fun. 

YM and YW are also keeping us pretty busy. Amy is really excited because she and the other leaders met together and created a plan for how to restructure the classes and class presidencies. We asked the bishop to call several new women in as advisors, which will be such a blessing. The YW had a big activity this last Friday night where we rode the frontrunner up to Salt Lake to see the lights on Temple Square and eat dinner at the Nauvoo Cafe. A couple of weeks before, the YW expressed interest in doing something to help homeless people, so one of our activities this month was shopping for and putting together care packages for homeless people with snacks, hand warmers, socks, etc. We took those with us to Salt Lake and gave them out to people that we passed. We had a series of mishaps befall us on the train ride back (it was jam-packed, the power went out for like 15 minutes, a high school kid asked for 4 of the young women's phone numbers, and we didn't get home until after midnight), but we had a fun time and now have a great story to tell. :) 

I honestly can't remember when we sent our last update so if this is a repeat just disregard it. My school took a fun field trip to see a BYU women's basketball game and Nathan met us there. My students kept staring at him and then looking away like they were all sneaky. My school also sponsored a family night at Classic Skating in Orem, so Nathan and I went and saw several of my students there. I'll send some pictures of both of those events (one of them shows Nathan and I on the big screen with one of my students dancing like a madman right in front of us, lol). 

A while ago, Nathan got contacted by someone in the Religion department because they wanted to spotlight a painting he made for his Foundations of the Restoration class in an exhibit at the JSB. They invited us to the event and Nathan, along with the other student artists, had to give a 3-minute talk about his painting. We also ate a lot of cream puffs while we were there. ;) 

One of Amy's team teachers at Larsen is named Katie Howard, and her husband Jason works in a virtual reality company called The Void. They have their headquarters in Lindon, which is where they test out their new VR experiences before they release them. They invited us along with the other two teachers on Amy's team, their husbands, & the student teacher who's been working with one of our team, and her husband. We had such a fun time with them and got to go through a cool Avengers-themed VR experience. 

We also went and threw hatchets with some of Nathan's friends from his program, which was fun. It was a massive group date. See pictures below.

I think that's all from us! A week from today, we will be flying out to West Virginia to spend Christmas with Amy's sister Carolyn and brother Rob. Amy is very close to both of them yet doesn't get to see them very often, so it is a great blessing to be with them for the holiday. 

We send our love to all of you this Christmas!

Nathan and Amy

Nathan's Birthday 2019