There is a reason why my Mom didn't let us help decorate the tree until we were oh, say, teenagers.
If you don't know me well, let me start by saying that I lean more towards the obsessive/compulsive side of things. If you do know me well, I assume you have a mental image of this evening.
I can usually watch my children make giant messes and put their toys away in the totally wrong place (as long as it's off the floor, I'm generally happy).
Decorating the tree, however, is something that I have lovely mental images of: slowly taking ornaments out of their boxes, picking the perfect place to put them - you get the idea. That is not what happened tonight. It started off well enough: Molly was putting non-breakable ornaments on the bottom branches and Emmett was busy pushing one of Molly's dolls around in its stroller. Which was great. Until Molly got her stool to put ornaments up higher. Then Emmett just wanted to push Molly off the stool so he could get on. Molly started yelling because Emmett was pushing her. Then Emmett noticed the ornaments and pulled some of them off the tree. Molly started yelling because Emmett was knocking things off the tree. Then Molly wanted to start pulling ornaments out of the box herself, which meant that my lovely organized tree turned quickly into 90% of the ornaments on the bottom 1% of the tree. And I tried to keep my head from exploding. At one point, I just left the scene and put E in pajamas to keep from losing it while Molly kept pulling things out being like, "Oh look at this one!" then putting it down & grabbing another one, "Can we do this one next?"
I know... I know... I need to relax and enjoy the moment, that I'll be sad when they're older & they don't care about decorating the tree. So I'll try. And if not, next time I'll just go put my pajamas on.
