Handley's note and summer goals

I consider myself a pretty laid back mom.  While I expect a lot of the girls, I also can overlook a lot, too.  However, there are sometimes that it just builds up and I loose it.  Like tonight.  Hudson was crying all evening, Harper was whiney and I was repeating myself over and over and over.  As we were making our way to the bathroom for baths, I was practically tripping over toys and stuff that was strewn all over the house and I lost it.  I yelled at the girls for not cleaning up their things and told them I was going to start throwing toys in the trash instead of picking them up myself.  That got their attention.

After their bath I told them to clean-up while I was putting Hudson to bed and then they could play for a little bit after they were done.  Well, when I came out of Hudson's room I found a very tidy house and a special note Handley had written for me.

Translation: she drew 3 hearts first, then the letters WR SRe FR No clen up = We're sorry for not cleaning up.

 I couldn't quite make out what she had written, until I had her read it for me.  Then I totally saw it and my heart melted.  I also felt really guilty for getting mad at them.  She is so sweet.

She really loves writing and I want to do more to help her reading and writing skills.  To hold myself accountable, I wanted to post my academic goals for the girls this summer.  I started working with her on sight words and she LOVES practicing them.  She knows 4-5 right now and my goal is for her to know 20 by the time she starts Kindergarten.

Harper has much less interest in doing anything academic related (besides cutting her shapes), but seeing Handley doing her work has made Harper a little more interested too.  My goal for her this summer is to have her writing her name by the time school starts and for her to know at least 50% of the alphabet.  Besides the letter H, she tells me everything is an A and if I say no, she moves to her next guess, B. :-)  Last week Handley said she would help Harper with her ABC flashcards while I was putting Hudson to bed.  She came running in to tell me that Harper knew ALL of them.  I had to see what she was talking about.  Turns out she knew what all the pictures were on the flashcards.  Ha! I had to explain to her that we wanted Harper to learn the letters, in addition to the pictures.

The first time Harper let me help her write her whole name.