Tree decorating with 3 year olds

Yesterday after I picked Emma up from school, we headed home to decorate the Christmas tree. I said decorate the "tree" and was promptly informed that, "No, Mama - you said the wrong thing. It's the Christmas tree." I was unaware that my daughter knew how to use italics but the point was made. So, we headed into the garage to get out the ornaments and other junk to decorate the Christmas tree and the rest of the living room.

I dropped the first ornament. That's the thing about having hardwood floors, ornaments break when dropped. I had purposely started with the cheapy, Wal-Mart ornaments for just such an event although, honestly, I had assumed little Miss E would be doing the dropping. I blame Pregnancy Clumsiness. It's a condition. Really. We continued with the decorating using the colored glass balls from WM. 15 minutes later, the front of the tree was loaded with ornaments (mostly blue and green glass balls) from the bottom of the tree to about 2 feet up. That's it. Not ornaments on the back or sides of the tree. At this point, we (Emma) had broken 3 more ornaments. That's when I had the brilliant idea to go get the unbreakable ornaments to let Emma work with. See, I'm a thinker. We spent the next 30 minutes loading the tree with unbreakable items. During this time Andy came home and nearly lost it when he saw the tree. He also pointed out the the entire thing was leaning noticeably toward the front and we might need to rearrange. Emma, of course, was adamant that we leave everything exactly where it was. So we did. Until she was asleep. Then we rearranged everything. She was quite complimentary of our decorating abilities when she got up this morning. Although she did say, "Mama, you shouldn't let Daddy do the Christmas tree by himself. He needs our help to make it pretty. He can't match." How correct she is. But let's me honest, it wouldn't get done without Andy's help. I can't reach the top.