Spring is almost here

Hello all, or no one which is more like who would actually take the time to read our blog. This is Josh and I have let Michele do all of the heavy lifting with this thing and it's time I started chipping in.

Spring has finally come to Knoxville, and I know this is a foreign concept to all of our Floridian friends. You have probably heard of this season and thought of it as some fictional place from a book, well it actually exists. It is a time between Winter (another season you are probably not very familiar with) and Summer (of which you are experts b/c it accounts for 10-11 of your months every year). It all happened one Saturday.

Driving home from work one Friday afternoon I noticed it was warmer than it had been in, well ever since we moved here, and it was really nice to drive home with the windows down in my car. Well low and behold Saturday morning I woke up and walked outside in my shorts to find the tree in front of our house full of blossoms, and birds all over the place. On our way to breakfast at Long's Drugstore (our Saturday morning breakfast spot) we noticed these flowers all over the place.

That's right, these grow in the wild up here. All down the side of the road, along the interstate, and it's absolutely beautiful. As we drove by the local boat dock there were trucks parked all over the place, probably 75 trucks and trailers at this one public dock. We went to the park that afternoon to play some Frisbee Golf and it was PACKED, I mean packed. There was no parking and people were just laying around in big groups having picnics, playing guitars, and just hanging out. It kind of reminds me of the beach in Florida without the shark infested sticky salt water and the fat dudes from Europe in speedos.

We have been fortunate enough to visit with a great portion of our family. We spent some time with Michele's Aunt & Uncle Ric and Chrissy as well as my Uncle Keith and Aunt Jackie when we were at my State Farm graduation. Then Michele's Mom got to come up for a week and a half (which was wonderful b/c Michele, Carson, and Chloe all got this horrible stomach bug and I never would have survived without her her, so thank you so much Lolli). We had a great time with her getting to go to the zoo and Carson's park (at least that is what he calls it) with her. The day she flew out my parents drove my new car up from Oviedo and got to spend a few days with us. The kids really didn't want them to go home as Carson was living their last day here in denial. I would tell him that we are going to the airport to take Grandma and Grandpa soon and he would just shake his head, say no, and go back to playing. Then the next day we were driving close to the airport he said "Daddy, you've got to go the other way so we can pick Grandma and Grandpa up, I just saw their plane fly in." Needless to say we had a wonderful few weeks with our family.



The great news is that we are excited for this weekend when the Leonards and our babysitter/super duper friend Ms. Brook(e?) is coming to visit us. We have an action packed long weekend and can not wait to see everyone. I'm sure there will be some incredibly cute pictures up following this weekend.

I will try to do much better on this thing so the posts won't be 57 pages long like this one. Thanks so much to anyone who has too much spare time on their hands and obviously really cares about us for taking the time to keep up with the Ellis'.

PS - anyone who is like me and more of a picture person, feel free to keep up with us on Flickr as well, I am much better about uploading pictures than I am about writing. Just go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/jellis219/ and you will see most everything we have been up to.