They lived in a one-bedroom apartment in (I believe) Augusta, Maine, crammed with a hoarder's treasure trove of shit, so of course it was never going to be clean. For a long time, I thought they had a basement apartment because it was such a dark, cheerless cave of a place, but it turned out to be on the first/ground floor; Emily had nailed blankets over all the windows, ostensibly to keep out drafts and keep in heat, but lezbereal—it was to keep passerby from seeing the squalor, and that there were small children living in it.
I can't remember how many of their kids were present during her heyday—I think it was five.
And yeah, Emily was trying to be a "frugality" blogger, but pretty much everything she did to save money could be described as "penny wise, pound foolish." She had no fucking clue, and everything she did was disgusting.
One of her greatest hits was making homemade cheese using one of her skirts to strain the curds. Her taste in home decor veered towards the bizarre, including a life sized Rottweiler plush that lived on a shelf in their disgusting bathroom; I think her name was Clarice.
Clarence! And I remember the skirt cheese far too well. And washing cloth diapers in cold water, in a WonderWash on the kitchen counter. And never turning on the heat, even though it was included in their rent.
Fuck, she was crazy.
Her husband Dan was an aspiring (Pentecostal?) preacher with a legitimate intellectual disability who often posted lengthy semi-literate, unintelligible screeds on his Facebook wall and sometimes misspelled his own (three letter) name, thus the "Dna" sobriquet.
NGL, I had some pity for Dan. He was a bottom-shelf Yankee cracker with horrifying teeth and severe dyslexia. I'm sure Emily picked him because one, he'd be dog-grateful to any woman who would marry him; and two, he (and her entire lifestyle) was chosen as a way to say, "Fuck you," to her successful, well-off mom. Emily grew up in comfortable circumstances, and chose to not only marry a man chosen to create maximum embarrassment for her mother, but to live in poverty and squalor and ensure that her kids would, too.
Dan was working as a Walmart janitor while studying at a tiny, so-called "bible college" to be a preacher. Emily (who, IIRC, has a college degree) did all of his assignments for him because he was functionally illiterate. Somebody on FJ ratted them out to the bible college, and they expelled him—ruining probably the one chance he might have had to better his family's circumstances.
He seemed to honestly love her and the kids, but Emily was really good at manipulating him. He didn't stand a chance.
*By "neglected children", I mean they didn't realize that their preschooler had fallen into a coma for a few days. She did, however, successfully grift a bunch of stuff for the kids, including an expensive organic crib mattress.
She didn't grift the mattress. One of the yentas at Free Jinger (Treemom, I think) decided, on her own, that one of the kids (who slept on a pile of blankets on the floor underneath the crib in the baby's "nursery," which had formerly been a laundry room) needed a proper mattress. She didn't consult Emily first; she just ordered it online and had it shipped to Emily. Emily was all about organic everything (despite the fact the crib was surrounded by dangerous shelves full of crap the baby could have pulled down), so she sent an organic latex one. I don't recall if Emily ended up selling it or not.
And, IIRC, there were a lot of government benefits Emily could have applied for, such as SNAP, that would have made life a lot easier for the entire family, but she had to have everything her own way, and refused to be answerable to anybody, even though it meant Dan was actually starving on meager rations of her horrible cooking (her disgusting homemade noodles—called "gloodles"—were legendary at FJ).
For anyone who follows Jen Armstrong/Life By Jen, Emily had a Marcene who would send her shit thinking that it would actually mean the kids didn't have to live in filth. No luck on that front.
Yeah, there were a bunch of women over there who would decide the cow they were mocking also needed to be the recipients of their charity. "Razing Ruth"/Chris Izer Bedell was the one who made a full-on grift out of it, though, by posing as a young woman who had escaped a forced marriage in a Quiverfull family. She was really just a fat, bored divorceé from Bakersfield, but she made a great run of it—she had FJers falling all over themselves to send her money, gifts, clothes, etc..
But at the same time as FJers dispensed largesse, they'd also wreck somebody's shit and feel no guilt about it. So Emily got an organic latex crib mattress—but Dan got kicked out of bible college, and I'm pretty sure somebody from there called CPS on them They did a lot of hypocritical, virtue-signalling bullshit—such as IRL harrassing the creepy Maxwell family cult, but then kicking out a member who got expelled from an open house at the Duggar place for trying to sneak in a concealed camera.
That whole forum was (and probably still is) such a hen-party shitshow, on top of having the worst UI of any forum I've been on.
Her house is fucking filthy though holy shit. The absolute grime on the floor where the cats are eating. Unless that's just bad lighting but it looks gross.
