can't get gulp to use browser-sync to refresh an express server and json

I'm learning react and the first thing I wanted was a development environment that could handle the reloading and refreshing for me. I'm following along with their tutorial here:

http://ift.tt/16xMkQg

Now I wanted to add gulp into this setup. The server ( http://ift.tt/1CjPQj6 )works fine on its own but doesn't have browser-sync and all the extras that come along with gulp of course.

so what I did was change the server's port to 9000 and proxy the browser-sync in. However, the proxy doesn't seem to pass ajax calls to the server so it can write the json. I've included my gulpfile here.

var gulp        = require('gulp');
var sass        = require("gulp-ruby-sass");
var filter      = require('gulp-filter');
var browserSync = require('browser-sync');
var sourcemaps  = require('gulp-sourcemaps');
var server      = require('gulp-express');
var reload      = browserSync.reload;

gulp.task('server', function(){
  server.run(['app.js']);

  browserSync({
    proxy: "localhost:9000"
  });

  gulp.watch("./scss/*.scss", ['sass']);
  gulp.watch("./app/**/*.html").on('change', reload);
});

// Compile sass into CSS & auto-inject into browsers
gulp.task('sass', function() {
  return sass('./scss', {sourcemap: true})
    .pipe(browserSync.reload({stream:true}))
    .on('error', function (err) {
      console.error('Error!', err.message);
    })
    .pipe(sourcemaps.write('maps', {
        includeContent: false,
        sourceRoot: './app/css'
    }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./app/css'));
});

gulp.task('html', function () {
    browserSync.reload();
});

// Watch scss AND html files, doing different things with each.
gulp.task('default', ['server'], function () {
  gulp.watch("./scss/*.scss", ['sass']);
  gulp.watch("./app/**/*.html", ['html']);
});

Other things I've tried

Before using a proxy. I tried to switch browser-sync's middleware to the express server I had. The problem I ran into is the documentation for this seems to assume I know what I'm doing with express enough to make it work (I mean, the documentation pretty much just shows a console.logged example. Pretty useless).