What a busy weekend we had! I thought I would share a picture post, with some narrative thrown in, so you can see for yourself - what a great weekend we had.

First, though, we were able to leave work on Friday a little earlier than originally planned. We had been keeping our eyes on the weather, and knew that there was a high potential for severe weather late in the afternoon and into the night, so when we found out we could leave town early, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to go ahead & leave so we could reach North Alabama before the weather hit.

And hit, it did. Read on...

When we were within 30 minutes of my parents' house, we noticed the sky turning ominous. We debated on whether or not it was something we wanted to try to "beat out." Iliya had just woken up from his nap, and something told me that we should probably turn the radio on, to make sure that we weren't driving into something truly dangerous. If you live in an area prone to tornadoes, you understand my thinking (or maybe you don't), but we weren't willing to be reckless, especially with Iliya in the backseat of the car.

From the information we heard on the radio, we deduced that - in our current direction and speed with which we were traveling - the likelihood of intersecting with a pretty dangerous storm was high... and then the weatherman gave a sharp reminder that tornadoes can seem to drop from nowhere (especially in the mountainous regions where we were - where there's no flat land to see them approach). We took that as our cue to park the car and wait for the potential danger to pass. Fortunately, I also have an animated radar on my phone - so we had a visual and were able to determine that we were in a safe place to sit in the car (rather than get in a ditch or knock on someone's door - though we are definitely not above doing either!).

We waited for probably about 20 minutes, and when we determined that the worst had probably passed, we set out again. As we drove, we were passed by about 8 emergency vehicles - all headed in the same direction we were. An announcement came over the radio and we learned that a tornado had hit a little farther down the road on which we were traveling. In fact, we later learned that it ended up being a huge tornado - an F3 that was a 1/2-mile wide and traveled for over 25 miles, taking out anything that stood in its path.

It dawned on us that - if we hadn't stopped to wait - we likely would have been caught in that very tornado. A very scary - and humbling - thought, indeed. We actually tried continuing down the normal way of getting to my parents' house (this was before we knew really what kind of destruction took place) and ended up having to turn around and go a different way.

But we made it safely - and thank God for watching out for us!

The rest of the weekend, comparatively, was low-key...but definitely fun!!  

On Saturday, we dyed eggs. I had wanted to, last year, but it just never worked out. I don't think Iliya would've really gotten into it so much, then. But this year, dyeing eggs was a HUGE thing, and he had a lot of fun with it!

Later on Saturday, we had a family Easter egg hunt and dinner at my parents' house. Iliya had a FUN time, hunting eggs. He actually understood what was going on this year...so he (and we!) had a blast!!

Instead of grabbing eggs and throwing them in his basket, he set his basket down and opened each egg he found, to inspect its contents.  After everything in the egg was assessed (and an excited shout of, "purple!" for each purple toy or piece of candy), it went into his basket, and he moved on to find the next treasure.

And sometimes, he just left his basket with me so he could run grab eggs and just bring them back. This was especially true once his basket became too full for him to carry without spilling eggs.

Since we hid some of the real eggs, Iliya had to have a taste of one of them. Nathan likes hardboiled eggs, so he helped the kids (Iliya & his cousins, Kyle & Kaitlyn) peel an egg. It went in and out of Iliya's mouth in .2 seconds - can you tell he didn't like it so much?

I was tired when I edited these photographs, so I'm not loving how each of them turned out, but here is me & Nathan:

And Iliya got a shrupper (sucker...well, actually, a Ring Pop) and he LOVED it. Much better than that nasty ole egg! :) Side benefit: it turned his tongue blue & he enjoyed making sure everyone noticed (how could you not?)!

Sometime between Saturday night & Sunday morning, the Easter Bunny came and left some treats for Iliya. I hear that the EB tried to find purple crocs for the boy, but couldn't find any in his size. But Iliya loves the purplish-blue ones anyway!

Here he is, inspecting some of his goodies:

We got ready Sunday morning, and headed to church with Nathan's parents & grandparents. It was a very good, uplifting service...and Iliya was SO well-behaved.

And after church, we went to Nathan's grandmother's house for their big Easter dinner & egg hunt. We tried getting some family pictures, but Iliya was being his usual formal-photo-induced-uncoperative self. Here, I'm sure I'm saying something to try to get him to smile or laugh or...something! Who knows what I was saying - I don't even remember. Probably something about boogers.

And then we tried to get pictures of him, Natalie, & Tabitha. But then he got a case of hyperformalphotoinduceduncooperativity. And poor little Tabitha, she was just along for the ride. Nathan and I tried everything we knew to do, but nothing works when Iliya gets in this mode.  And nothing working leads to frustration...I've GOT to get better about this with him!

Anyway...

These top two pictures are representative of about 15 other pictures just like them.

Bless his heart, though, he gave it a good ole college try for the last few we tried - he eeked out a couple of smiles. Don't know if the baby monster look is what we were going for, though...

And later, we sat on the swing with Nathan's grandmother, and I shot some great pictures of Tabitha - she's such a sweet baby:

And to round out this post, I share with you - the Bridges...Easter 2009.