Our Story

Brandon and I met at a scholarship dinner our second week at BYU. I was head over heels right away. And Brandon was madly in love with me too...he was just too focused on his mission to know it yet ;). We saw a lot of each other our freshman year and Brandon asked me on a couple casual dates. Then Brandon was called on a mission to Taiwan Taichung (same mission as Jason and Kyle...it was fate!) and I started the nursing program at BYU. I never stopped thinking about Brandon, and about six months before the end of his mission (about the time I was starting to think about going on a mission myself) I decided to write him a letter. We wrote back and forth a few times...each letter from Brandon eliciting a whole lot of jumping and screaming at the mailbox ;). On June 4, 2010 I came back from a 5-week study abroad (to Taiwan of all places) with the nursing program and immediately opened my mission call to New York New York South. On June 8th Brandon came home from his mission and a couple weeks after that he looked me up on facebook (thank you, FB). We exchanged numbers and spent the summer texting and talking on the phone. At the beginning of August I came up to Utah to have knee surgery...but mostly to see Brandon. We spent a Saturday together, an absolutely perfect Saturday. I had dinner with his family the next day and then Brandon drove me to the airport, kissed me, and said goodbye for a year and a half. Right. The next day we decided Brandon better come to Arizona, so he flew down and spent the next weekend with me and my family. Then he left on a cruise with his family and when he came back a week later I had postponed my mission, registered for classes at BYU, and rented an apartment in his ward :). On October 16, 2010 Brandon asked me to marry him, and on December 18, 2010 we were sealed for time and all eternity in the Mesa Arizona Temple.

We have loved married life from the start! We moved into a small (but wonderful!) apartment in Provo and continued our education at BYU. I graduated from the nursing program in April 2011 and got a job as a RN at Orem Rehab working full-time nights. In the fall of 2011 Brandon started the Flagship Program which would take us to China the following year! In January we found out the happy news that I was pregnant and due September 22nd. Which meant that I would be delivering the baby in China. We were both excited...and scared. But after many prayers we felt assured that this was the Lord's will and He would take care of us :).

So why China? Brandon has loved Chinese for a long time, and serving a mission in Taiwan solidified his love for the language and the culture. I also have a special love for China after doing a summer exchange program to Zhenjiang when I was 16 and then traveling to Taiwan with the BYU nursing program in 2010. Brandon is studying Chinese and International Relations at BYU and hopes to work with Asia in his future career (though we don't know yet what career that will be). We were very blessed to get a summer internship working at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai so this past summer we lived in Shanghai and I studied Chinese while Brandon gained valuable experience with the foreign service. And now the school year has begun and we are living in Nanjing where Brandon is studying at Nanjing University with the Flagship Program. The Flagship Program is what brought us here in the first place. Brandon applied for the program a year ago and spent the past year at BYU taking extra classes and working with a tutor to further improve his Chinese in preparation for this year. He will study here for a semester and then do a four-month internship (maybe in Nanjing, but possibly somewhere else in China) with a Chinese law firm. We're hoping this will give Brandon some great experience, and give us the opportunity to see how we like living abroad. In June 2013 we will head back to the States where Brandon will finish his last year at BYU!