Emmett, Emmett & Rigtrup

We had the two Emmett clans over today for a quick little Christmas party. The holiday season can be so crazy we don't even see eachother. So we decided to be sure and let the kids party hard together this year. Natalie made some incredibly delicious yet slightly disabled gigerbread men for the kids to decorate. Nena had her Mom with her who is visiting all the way from Dubai, and her sister in law and nephew who are here from Utah. It was wild and crazy as always and tons of fun! Love you guys, thanks for taking the time to trek out to my neck of the woods!

A little house love

I don't know if I've mentioned the barn door around here, but I had big plans for a barn door! It took some convincing for Alan to get on board for this project but I won him over eventually (I always do). So thanks to my favorite website (craigslist) I was able to buy the barn door and track from someone out in Olympia who didn't know what they'd be missing out on when selling this bad boy. Little did they know that if your brave like me you can use a barn door...indoor. Instead of your traditional french doors leading into an office, in our house you get this...




Believe me, I realize that this is not for everyone, but it's sooo me. I'm really very in love with it...can you marry a barn door? No, Alan may have a problem with that.


My other true house love is my new fabulous dining room lights. I can't even put into words the deep joy these bring me...deep joy I tell you! I've wanted/coveted/lusted after these lights for 5 or 6 years now. They are now mine and I stare at them all the time, but then my eyes hurt so I have to look away. Now you may have the pleasure of staring at my beauties...




Just don't judge my crusty table to harshly. I have pictures to take and blogs posts to write, there's no time for scrubbing tables around here!

The poor missionaries...

We had the missionaries over for dinner last night. Alan loves to try and feed them something they wouldn't normally have at a members home. He fed the sister missionaries ribeye steaks last year, needless to say the loved that! When he found out that one of our missionaries had lived in Japan for a few years he decided to make sushi. The hard part is that we have to drive an hour to buy sashimi quality fish for the sushi. Worth it to Alan though. He tends to go overboard on most things and this was no exception. Thankfully we already had a lot of the items he needed like seaweed, shitaki mushrooms and rice. But he still spent around $60 on the ingredients! I'm going to interject here and tell you that there isn't a single person in our house aside from Alan that will touch Sushi with a 10, no make that a 100 foot pole. So he made mass amounts of Sushi and it turns out the other missionary agrees with the rest of my family and was not super excited about the sushi dinner. LOL, he tried one and he seriously turned green! I ended up making him a roast beef sandwich. I felt so bad for him! The sushi didn't go to waste though, amazingly, Alan and Elder Baxter ate ALL of it. Just makes me want to vomit thinking about it!

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...

Yes, I already have the tree up! Alan gave up years ago trying to convince me not to get a tree so early. I don't really care if it's dead by Christmas, I want to enjoy it as long as possible.
Although one year we were having a Christmas party and the tree was so dead, it was embarrassing. So I went out and bought a new tree, drug it inside, tore down the old one and redecorated the new one all by myself. I knew Alan would never let me do it, so snuck and did it all while he was at work! Mwahaahaa!
Anyway this years tree was up and decorated on Saturday. Another tree rule of mine is that it has to be decorated the same day we buy it. WHY? Because my Scrooge of a Dad would force us to "let the branches rest" before we could decorate it. This would take a day or two in his opinion. It nearly killed me to wait. Really it was just my Dad who needed to rest! He made us all suffer the anticipation of tree decorating, I've never forgotten the torture. I promise never to put my kids through it.
I'm really rambling today, sorry! This was my second year trying not to be a tree Nazi. Which means I let my kids put all the ornaments up without interference from me. Thankfully Taylor is a chip off the old block and she takes care of the Nazi part for me. She moves all the ornaments the boys put on so that the "flow" of ornaments is more uniform. Ahhh, I love that girl!

Thanksgiving

Happy Halloween!

I hope you all had a fabulous Halloween! We had a great time trick or treating with a few friends. Good dessert and company followed. This is the first year we've lived in a house where we actually get trick or treaters. I had a blast seeing all the costumes and handing out candy. We had LOADS of teenagers though, which I thought was weird. I think I stopped trick or treating when about 12 or 13. We had kids that were pushing 16 and 17 for sure, is that to old or am I just getting old???