As her dad and I were walking Norah through her list of chores for the 100th time this morning, we noticed something. She will do things like wipe off parts of the bathroom counter but leave other parts of the counter really dirty. Or she'll pick up all the various toys and books off her floor and just pile them on the top of her dresser or shelf, not taking them back to where they each go.

And as he and I were getting more and more frustrated because she was just going through the motions and as she was getting more and more exasperated because she didn't understand why we were frustrated since she was doing the tasks we asked her to do, something occurred to Dwayne. He pointed out that Norah was focusing on doing the tasks on her lists and not really even understanding the desired result of them. So then I had the idea of changing the wording of Norah's daily routine and replacing her list of tasks with the list of results or goals we want her to accomplish.

So Norah and I just sat down and discussed how we could change the tasks on her list into the goals behind them. You can see the new list of goals above. She came up with most of the wording on her own. So instead of "Take your vitamin. Give Avril her vitamin, too." it says "Yours and Avril's body gets vitamin supplements."  and instead of "Spray the crabs with fresh water."  it says "Crabs shells stay moist."  The whole thing already seems to make more sense to Norah and she seems less exasperated all of a sudden. Here's hoping this helps Norah accomplish the results we expect of her, those good, healthy purposes for which we gave her chores in the first place.