We are done with our first order!

Yesterday we sent out our first order for wearHD (actually our first order was for my dad before he left to Spain but we only made a dollar and it's getting framed so it doesn't count). We made 14 shirts for a girl's softball team in Minnesota. And even though all of our systems are terribly inefficient right now because we're figuring out how to use them as we go along, the shirts ended up looking great and we are learning a lot. So far we have figured out that starting a business is exhausting! (we sort of anticipated this already but like having a baby it's a very different thing from knowing it's going to take a lot of work to actually feeling how much work it takes). Thankfully in spite of being tired, we are fairly encouraged with business things.

The other bright spot in our lives is of course Pace. He started to officially crawl on July 11th -- not just rocking back and forth or scooting his hind end and then falling forward, which he was doing for the better part of a month. He finally figured out how to do the alternating hand/knee thing and can now get across a room in no time flat. Which means we no longer have a spare moment free when he is awake. Kira's mom's house is full of color from around the world, which Pace loves to explore; unfortunately there are also many sharp glass and stone edges and we had our first casualty yesterday - nothing that a little comfort nursing couldn't handle though. :)

Overall though, we must say we've been fairly discouraged and grumbling the last couple of weeks especially. Moving to a new place is always hard, especially hard on Kira. We really miss the comfort of Philadelphia - having all of our routines and dinner/card/boardgame playing buddies in place. We are very social and it is difficult for us not to have people to hang out with. This was accentuated more perhaps after Kira's brother Gabe and cousin Yasmin came to visit at the beginning of the month and then left. We had so much fun with them (hooray for tubing down the provo river!) and were really disappointed to see them go. But the burden is on us to be a friend before we expect to have friends (as a wise, and maybe tipsy, Josh Bodine once told us before we left (: ). So you can be reminding us to get out of our funk and get to know people.

Church has been discouraging, mostly because Kira misses good teaching on Sunday and we both miss people to pray with during the week. Here again, we know these things take time to develop relationships and every church has its strengths and weaknesses. This church is really big without a lot of depth it seems. And yet, we have been asked to do counseling and have agreed to lead a small group of people in the fall through some of the CCEF curriculum (the counseling curriculum Kira did at Westminster seminary). Kira is also doing one-on-one counseling with a teenager and hopes to use the opportunity to develop her thoughts about what it meant to grow up in Utah and then share those with the teens in the church. We told the pastors that it would be better to spend our time doing less individual counseling and instead focus on systemic change. We are very very encouraged by how open the pastors are to seeing counseling become part of the church and how willing they are to talk about our ideas, even though we just moved here.

Alright, clearly we should update this blog more often! This is much longer than a blog should be. Stay in touch. We changed our cell # to a Utah area code. It's 801-368-9602.