She turned 2...

So we gave her a horse. She wasn't the least bit interested in it at first - naturally - but when all her cousins fought to ride it during the party, her competitive side got the best of her and now she fully appreciates her horse. Lovely how that all works out.

She was asked to smile for the camera. This is what we got:

I completely copied Ashlee and made a rainbow cake. My kitchen was a disaster, my socks now have orange speckles on them, I'm certain a few egg shells ended up in the finished product, and I followed the instructions all wrong...but no complaints really.

Mmm...frosting. BTW, next year I'm just gonna whip out a can of Pillsbury frosting and let her go to town on it. Who needs cake really?

Her cake suddenly became completely uninteresting when she realized the cousins were all momentarily staking their claim on her gifts.

So she joined them. And despite her size, she held her own.

When the party was over, things started out great with her new shopping cart.

But all went downhill when Kory had an ingenious idea to teach her this:

...must have slipped his mind that he goes to work all day...

So of course this is now the main use for the cart.

And I'm tired.

And what's a good blog post these days without some poor quality footage? The story begins in the early morning hours on Maggie's birthday as I neglect to feed her breakfast for the sake of trying to capture her ABCs on camera, and ends with Kory blowing out her candles after a rousing rendition of the birthday song, which was perfectly overshadowed by my lovely vocals in the key of chipmunk. Enjoy.



Special thanks to all the family members who came to celebrate and provide her with the gifts she loves. And to Leapfrog of course.

Maggie workin' it

Blogging intimidates me now. So much space...more than 140 characters...what to say?

Thought it was about time I posted some pictures of Maggie. I think the last time I posted anything about her was when she was like barely walking and only knew how to say "no." Times have changed...well, she still prefers a good "no" to any other word, but she has added a few others to her repertoire since then.

This was after the city Easter egg hunt that lasted approximately 11 seconds. She mostly just put her loot in all the other kids' baskets, but she did manage to walk away with a few choice items...and she chose well because I quite enjoyed them.

You just can't beat a good pipe band on Memorial Day, you know?

Her first pool party. Neighbor Sarah's letting her borrow this bikini for the summer...and I say as long as she has the figure for it, she should just go right ahead and flaunt it.

We went to that cool splash pad in South Ogden for a combined family birthday party. The storm timely blew in as soon as everybody arrived, so we were forced to pick up and crash grandma's house. Maggie wasn't too upset we had to bail though, since the confidence she appears to have in this photo was quite fleeting once she got sprayed.

Her daily fix of Kai Lan.

It's all fine and good 'till the thunder rolls in.

I sent her out in the rain to pick some shrooms for a salad I was making. Luckily I had the foresight to freeze a ton, so whatever party we're invited to next, just go ahead and sign me up for a salad will ya?

Since I refuse to attempt the typical photo centers until she's like 8, this is the best picture I have of her actually standing still. Took it last month and haven't been able to recreate the moment since.



And of course, some footage. So there's a lot of repeated stuff, but I was too lazy to do too much of all that fancy splicing stuff, so it's loads longer than it needs to be. Oh yeah, and it turns out YouTube cut off her head! Not like literally, but... Anyway, the video I took has her entire head, so apparently I'm not a total moron...yet.

Ok, so this is pretty awesome.

(And FYI fellow Twitterers, my user name is CarleeHoopes now, not Choopes12.)

Let this be a lesson to you

It seems the cops are getting more ruthless these days, which can only mean one thing . . . I gotta come up with some new material. In the past, I've usually been able to talk myself out of tickets, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Gone are the days when I was able to get out of them by bouncing up and down and blaming my speed on "needing to go to the bathroom SOOOO bad" and my fear of public restrooms.

So on my way home from improv class Saturday night, I somehow lost track of where I was going and ended up on a road west of the airport. Once I turned around and headed due east, I finally found Legacy Parkway. Confused about Legacy Parkway? Well, let me tell you, it's definitely not a freeway, and certainly not a highway, but, as I found out, it's a byway. . . as in, by the way, you're gonna have to travel ridiculously slow on this road despite the fact that it bears an uncanny resemblance to a freeway. Turns out it's not a freeway because the stupid Sierra Club complained too much. They're good at that. So there I was, happily belting out some tunes, when I noticed those annoying flashing lights following close behind. Rubbish.

I still believe my first mistake was that I pulled off to the left side of the road . . . probably not the best way to make a good first impression. After I was instructed to relocate my car to the other side of the byway, officer unfriendly came up to greet me and I decided to go for the nice, innocent girl routine. I apologized profusely and admitted that I was unaware of the speed limit. I told him the truth . . . that I thought the speed limit was 65 mph (who really looks at speed limit signs anymore?), as it should be, and then the "travel at the speed of traffic" rule allows you to go about 5(ish) mph faster, naturally. He wasn't amused.

In the end I resorted to the tears. There they were, streaming down my cheeks, and when he handed me the stupid pink piece of paper I made sure to look at him, hoping as a last resort that he would see the tears, decide to cut me some slack, and rip it up. For heavens sake, it was late. And the dark, vacant byway scared me. What was I to do but drive a wee bit faster to calm my troubled mind and get home as quickly as possible? My hand was shaking as the tears dripped onto the $150(ish) piece of paper that I had to sign my name to. But he didn't buy it. The surly smokey still had the nerve to issue me the ticket. WAY LAME!

Kory laughed when I showed him the evidence, but I felt so bad that I told him I was gonna get a job to pay it off as my self-inflicted punishment. He raised an eyebrow and said, "no you're not." I guess I could slow down, but I feel more compelled to come up with some better excuses to use the next time around. Those county mounties aren't gonna get the best of me...(they might get the best of my bank account though. Sigh.)

(Ash, I'm talkin' about the mean ones. I'm gonna assume Casey would have had some compassion in a situation like this. i.e., crying girl in the dark. I'm sure he gets the tears a lot though...I should have known I was pushin' it with that one. There's always next time...)

Approximately 26 years

That's how long it's taken me to realize that adding salt to all my dessert recipes doesn't make a bit of difference. I've had my suspicions for years, but I've always erred on the side of caution and added it anyway because google tells me that it enhances the sweetness or something crazy like that. If you ask me, that's just Morton's description of creative marketing. Whatever. It's not important. As soon as I watch U2's final performance on Letterman, I'm gonna hit the sack.

Oh yeah...

I didn't hear about it either. But I saw it in person when I came home one day.

Here's a kicker...

Did you hear the one about the guy who wanted to make a syrup shake so he whipped up some hot maple syrup and poured it into a blender full of ice cream, and (obviously) the syrup instantly melted the ice cream, turning the would-be shake into some sort of disgusting warm maple creamy liquid?

I don't even want to know how he found this.

Kory wants one of these. And I'm 96% sure he's serious. I mean, programmers thrive on this kind of stuff. I considered making his dreams come true for about 8 seconds, but then I started imagining the soundtrack that would inevitably accompany our lives, and the thought of hearing this every night as I climbed into bed ultimately made my mind up . . . I'm definitely thinking not so much.

Just when I thought I couldn't like Chris Martin (and the rest of Coldplay, naturally) any more than I already do, this aired:

Sigh.

Forget grades. Here's how you really prepare them for their future.

You know that Seinfeld where Elain agrees to take George's IQ test for him and she spills coffee all over it just before she delivers it back to him, so it basically breaks their cover? Yeah, that totally happened to me. Well, except it didn't. And I'm pretty sure I'm not doing illegal things. But, what happened to me reminded me of that episode, and any Seinfeldesque moment is worthy of a blog post. Agreed?

Anyway, so I grade student essays for one of my former college professors. I've done it for years and it's always worked out just fine. The courier delivers them to my house, I grade them, she comes back the following week to pick them up, and then they're handed back to the students with suggestions and scores. Well, yesterday I was doing the dishes and I was relieved that Maggie seemed to be entertaining herself for a while. Silence. Nice. No, silence BAD! I immediately ran upstairs and found ripped up papers strewn across my bedroom floor with pencil marks all over them. I left them on my nightstand and forgot to close the door to ensure a destruction-free zone. ARGH! So now some lucky college students are gonna get crumpled, torn, scribbled-on essays handed back to them next week. Splendid.

Let's just say that I have nothing to read, so I'm gonna blog. Apparently it's one or the other with me...

Turns out I like to read. Who knew? So I'm up to like, oh I don't know, 7 books in the past 2 months. If you'd told me a year ago that I would read that many books, like, ever, I would've laughed in your face. But alas, there is hope for us all. Anyway, so today I went to get myself a library card. The process went smoothly, but shortly after making it all official they sent me on my way to fend for myself. And it didn't take long for me to realize that I've forgotten how to use a library. I literally stood in front of a computer and had no idea what to do with the results it gave me, so I ended up getting overwhelmed and leaving with nary a book (notice my new stellar vocab chops?). I just couldn't get myself to ask the desk lady to explain the library to me after I'd just confessed my age on the card application. For all she knew I was new to the area, and for my dignity's sake, I preferred to keep it that way.

I'm pretty sure the last time I used a library for finding a book was in 6th grade, or maybe 9th, when I had a thing for Amelia Bedelia. And you know, Dewey's decimal system is way more complex than it's talked up to be. But what's really sad is that there's all sorts of people in Kory's family who are in the know about libraries and Dewey's crazy system, so I really should be humiliated that I'm confessing this. But it's late, and I'm watching "The Count of Monte Cristo" and stuffing my face with banana muffins, so I'm not. . .