You're getting closer. Regarding your electron-emitting-photons example: I would describe the photons being emitted as themselves in a quantum superposition of

You're getting closer. Regarding your electron-emitting-photons example: I would describe the photons being emitted as themselves in a quantum superposition of having been emitted/not emitted/emitted at different times, etc. It is when we detect or observe the photon that the state of the whole system collapses! The electron and the photon are entangled. Continue this line of thinking and you arrive at the famous Schrodinger's cat... it's a cascading entanglement of larger and larger groups of particles until you open the box and the waveform of every particle in the whole cat collapses to either alive or dead. The waveform is not really a physical object; I think of it as a probability distribution about the state of the system when observed. These probabilities can be highly correlated; in this case, the probability of observing the electron at one energy level or another is 100% correlated to the probability of observing or not observing the photon at all - which is the definition of entanglement. Yes, you are constantly observing collapsing wave functions. It might be some solace that most of said wave functions have highly-degenerate probability distributions. By this I mean that 99.999...% of the "mass" of the distribution lies in something reasonable happening. For example, each particle in a tennis ball is so highly entangled to every other particle, that when you throw it against a wall, it's exceedingly likely that the ball will bounce back. A single unentangled atom may have been able to pass right through the wall, but the tennis ball's "waveform" is much more stable and localized such that it's better approximated by classical mechanics.