Decorating for Christmas

The day after my big shopping spree, I decided to spend the whole day at home putting up Christmas.  Normally I do most of the decorating by myself and then let the kids do the tree as an FHE activity.  This year I thought it would be fun if we all helped.  They boys had all taken a turn helping with lights outside so I figured this would be perfect.  It started off well with enthusiastic kids, my favorite Christmas candle and lovely music in the back ground.  Well, it only went down hill from there.  The boys went to work outside with the lights.  One boy helping... wonderful.  Three boys helping... disaster.  I realized this when the crying started because littler boys were being hit with staples that big boys were shooting at them.  There was "playful" pushing and poking going on which also resulted in boys crying.  The girls were busy inside pulling everything out as quickly as possible while yelling "where does this go??"  I encouraged them to slow down, we would figure it out.  Using all the patience I could muster we found places for most things.  Whitley and Stephen were having a hard time getting the lights on the tree to work so I stepped in only to find out they had unplugged almost everything.  I had no idea what went where.  My arms were only slightly scratched up as I dug and replugged each cord till it finally all worked.  Dalin spent much of the day in tears because he was too little to do the important things and a big "fail" at anything else he tried, such as putting up garland outside. Then when I wouldn't let him put the star on our 9 ft tree, he lost it.  Oh brother.  I was slowly loosing it.  I had definitely done my share of controlled yelling, and was trying really hard to be kind when I told them to not shoot staples at each other AGAIN,  but I was failing quickly.

It all went down the drain in the same 10 min when Stephen said I needed to hot glue my crystal mistletoe because some of the "greenery" had come off. He also commented that I was lucky it wasn't broken cuz he almost dropped it. That's how the greenery came out.  I was lucky????  Right after I glued it for him, I came out to see Rhett digging in my my $40 candle with a spatula.  That was it.  Controlled yelling was now gone. Turns out, he was trying to relight it and it tipped over spilling wax all over the floor and wall.  He was scraping it up and putting it back in.  He ran off crying while I yelled apologies for yelling at him.  I cleaned up the mess and announced  "for today, Christmas is over."  I forced them all to help clean up the mess we had created, sweep and vacuum and called it a day.  I'm pretty sure they were all grateful.  The lights are not quite finished, my big tree isn't decorated and I still have a few bins of odds and ends.  Next year, we go back to the old plan.  I was feeling more like a Grizzwald today rather than in It's a Wonderful Life.  I'm sure I'll get to the point of laughter, but today wasn't really it. We'll try again tomorrow... when they are all at school. Ü