***Closed***12 Days Of Chrismas Giveaways- Day 1- Big Skinny Wallets

Congratulations to Karen F! You won this giveaway! Thanks to all who entered and to Big Skinny for sponsoring this great giveaway. Winner chosen by Random.org

I guess we should have called this the 12 days of Holiday Giveaways, but oh well, Christmas was on my brain when we talked about it here at home. I may have to extend some of the giveaways to make sure they receive enough exposure though, but wanted to get the bulk of the work completed before I go back to my client full-time.

Anywoo…..On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to YOU- A wallet of YOUR choice from Big Skinny! One winner will get a wallet of their choice from Big Skinny! Exciting huh!

Big Skinny has a variety of products including our two favorites:

Woman’s Taxicat Bi-Fold Wallet In Pink and I really liked this wallet. It was not too bulky, and I loved the pink color! 🙂 I really liked that the plastic “thing” in the wallet kept my money from sliding around and falling out. I thought that this wallet was a great addition to any woman’s closet! This wallet comes in 6 colors and is $23.95. I think this wallet is my favorite of the two wallets.

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Executive Checkbook Bi-Fold Wallet With Zippered Pocket In Purple: This great wallet is perfect for the working woman as it holds about 40 thick plastic cards, checkbook, and stretched out cash money plus coins. Their special “divide & conquer” design breaks up your cards into 4 discrete areas so they don’t all stagger on one long row leaving huge lumps. How cool is that? The wallet was very nice. And comes in 6 colors. This wallet is $25.95.

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Enter to win….

Mandatory Entry:Go to bigskinny.net and tell me what wallet you would choose if you won.

Extra Entries (Please be sure and leave a comment and link for extra entries):

1 Entry: Follow Faith and Family Reviews On Twitter

1 Entry:
Follow Big Skinny on Twitter .

1 Entry: Like Faith and Family Reviews on Facebook. Please do not unlike us after the contest is over. Isn’t that a form of dishonesty? Just sayin’. Put yourself in our shoes, ok? Thanks!

Editor’s note: We learned recently that Facebook limits the amount of “likes”, so not much we can do besides friend each other. Just let us know in your comment which one you did for us and the giveaway sponsor. Thanks!

1 Entry:
Like Big Skinny On Facebook

2 Entries:
Follow Faith and Family Reviews on Google Friend Connect (on the our right side bar).

2 Entries: Tweet about this giveaway, but only one tweet per day please. Include your tweet url with your comment. You may write your own tweet or use this one:

Giveaway: Enter to win a wallet from Big Skinny! U choose! @faithfamilyrevw! http://faithandfamilyreviews.com/?p=5567 Please share! Thx!


5 Entries:
Blog about this giveaway and link back to this post and Big Skinny.

1 Entry for every comment you leave anywhere else on this blog, but please leave a link with your comment!

5 Entries:
Sign up for Big Skinny’s email newsletter which is on their website.

5 Entries:
Tell me your favorite things about Christmas. (memories, movies, food,gifts, ect, ect)

Details:

This giveaway will run from November 22nd to Sunday, December 5th at midnight CST. The winner will be chosen through Random.org. Winner will be contacted via email on or before December 15th and will be asked for their contact, choice of wallet, and other pertinent info. Winners will have 48 hours to send me their info at [ffr] [giveaways] [at] [gmail] [dot] [com] (without spaces and parenthesis). Please note: This giveaway is offered to US only.

Thanks and have fun!


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77kids Holiday Event

Faith and Family Reviews received a stipend and gift cards for participating in the following event, thanks to The Motherhood.com and 77kids by American Eagle. While we consider it a privilege to work with companies, our thoughts and opinions are our honest opinions of the event and store.

A few weeks ago we were invited to a holiday event with American Eagle’s 77kids brand. We were very excited to receive another opportunity to work with them! Yesterday was the event and we attended a VIP kick-off party at the new Chicago area 77kids store. We got a sneak peek at the magical window displays, received free treats and got a really good look at the store itself.

The 77kids staff worked around the clock for a week to get the store ready for their November 18th opening, just three days ago. The store looked great and very festive for the season. I have to admit that I loved their winter clothing selection.

We joined other area moms and their kids as we toured the store. The children were able to explore the neat dressing rooms with “windows”, play on bean bag chairs, sit in the little birdie chair that symbolizes the 77kids brand (our youngest daughter loved that it was pink and located in the little girl section!), and use the store’s camera to take some very unique looking photos, which were printed out at the register. Then we enjoyed shopping with the gift card we were provided especially for this event. Our older girls got socks, gloves, pj bottoms and a camisole, while our youngest was a bit spoiled by yours truly (well, to be honest she tends to be spoiled by all of us!) and received a dress and leggings. Our boys got new watches and at the risk of being unpopular among our readership, I didn’t buy our two little guys anything. They really didn’t need anything. As it was, I went over my alloted gift card, but the children did so well that I wanted to treat them to something they actually needed. Besides, who doesn’t like something new now and then? Last night I did a few freelance jobs to almost pay for the overage anyways. Thank God for work-at-home opportunities.

Below you will find some fantastic photos from our morning at Schaumburg’s 77kids store:

The only disappointing thing about this event was the miscommunication that occurred preventing us from enjoying breakfast at the store with the whole Chicago group. But, hey, we live in an imperfect world and things like this happen. Everything else was great, as you can see from the above photos.

Giving Back

In addition to kicking off the grand opening of their new store, 77kids is outdoing themselves on the charity front as well. They are donating to local children’s hospitals. So this is where we need your help. If you go to the 77kids holiday microsite and create a digital snowflake – it’s easy, fast and fun – and with 100,000 snowflakes, 77kids will donate $25,000 to the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago! This is a wonderful opportunity for all of you to get involved too.

Keep your eye open for our upcoming giveaway of a 77kids gift card this week!


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Rock What You’ve Got Book Review

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product in exchange for writing a review. While we consider it a privilege to receive free products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product.

I really really enjoyed Rock What You’ve Got by Miss Katherine Schwarzengger. As a teenager I had developed a negative self-image of myself and began thinking I was fat when I wasn’t. I cannot begin to count how many times I’ve been told I was thin and slender/skinny. I just thought everyone who told me that was lying and being nice to me. Katherine’s book really opened my eyes to the fact that I can’t be perfect and that I can’t look like the size 0, six ft tall, 90 lb super models. These models are unhealthy, frequently too skinny and are air brushed, on top of being edited on photo shop. Those women aren’t real. They are just fake women. The fact of the matter is most of those models are between the ages of 14-19 and haven’t developed their “womanly” figures yet.

Rock What You’ve Got is a WONDERFUL book. Katherine shows all young girls that it’s not your outer beauty that matters but your inner beauty that really, really counts. She covers a wide varity of topics from healthy eating to your period. I loved her honest opinion of things and the fact that she shows us proof that you can’t look like a fashion magazine model.

This book is in a easy to read format yet it is very educational. Some how after reading this book I just don’t feel bad about my body any more. I don’t think I have felt like this in a long time. But, I like that! 🙂

I loved Rock What You’ve Got and will be reading it again and again. (I did however skip the section on birth control as I didn’t really think I needed to read that). This book will show and help any young woman that they ARE beautiful and will help them with issues so many young women struggle with. I highly recommend Rock With What You’ve Got as a wonderful, educational, helpful, easy to read book for any young woman!

You may purchase this book at Hyperion for $19.99.


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Christmas at Harrington’s – Revell Blog Tour

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product in exchange for writing a review. While we consider it a privilege to receive free products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product.

Once again, Revell surprised me. I wasn’t expecting such an endearing Christmas story from the description they sent to me. I loved this little novel, which was less than 200 pages long. It was a story of love, hope and forgiveness.

I loved the emphasis on new beginnings and second chances for the main character, Lena Markham. Her circumstances such as they were – penniless, friendless – reminded me of what some homeless or hard hit individuals must go through.

This past week my husband and oldest daughter volunteered at a food pantry passing out food for a couple of hours. The needs are great not only in the lives of the people going to the mission for food, but also for the food pantry itself. Did you know that families only receive one roll of toilet paper per week? Could your family be so frugal to only use a roll of TP in one week?

Lena Markham was a needy character who had lost her faith in people and in God. When she started her new job, as Mrs. Santa at Harrington’s department store, she met new people who loved her for who she was; she slowly regained ground in the trust department and her heart began to soften as she chose to help others and be the person she was meant to be. I wonder how many lives we could touch for good if we just chose to look beyond a person’s circumstance, appearance or even first impressions? After all, we can’t get to know a person if they are holding back their true self out of the desire to protect themselves.

Lena finds the change she’s looking for and even reveals her true character, yet would that be enough to sustain her new life? When I discovered the answer to this question, I turned the page to realize I had just finished Christmas at Harrington’s. Melody Carlson left me wanting more. I wanted to know the rest of the story – how all the different circumstances played out and what was next for Lena and the rest of the characters. I was left wanting to know if Melody is planning to write a sequel to this book! Please Melody write a sequel. 😉

Christmas at Harrington’s is an inspiring story that not only focuses on the true meaning of Christmas, which is the greatest gift of all, but also what it means to truly give a person a second chance.


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Thrifty Thursday- Free Days At The Museum Of Science and Industry (a day late)

A couple of weeks ago we where able to enjoy a fun trip to TMOSAI in Chicago. Aside from paying for parking we got in free since TMOSAI offers free days for homeschoolers, just as they do for public schools!

We had a enjoyable time seeing all the fun activities at the museum. Unfortunately we were only able to visit the 1st floor of TMOSAI so we hope to go back on another free day and see the other two floors. However, our children loved exploring the U5O5 exibit as well as the Farm Exhibit, Science Exhibits, and so many other featured exhibits.

Here are some pictures from our fun day-

Happy Thrifty Thursday!


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12 Days of Christmas Giveaways!

We have a change of plans. Instead of our normal Faith and Family Reviews Giveaway today, on Sunday we will be featuring 12 Days of Christmas Giveaways! We had a ton of reviews and giveaways to feature and as we were scheduling them we discovered some of them were getting pretty close to Christmas and many of these things would make wonderful Christmas gifts. That’s when we decided to do a week’s worth of giveaways to give you all a chance to win these products and receive them in time for Christmas. We may still feature our Friday Giveaways in December, but we may also take the month off. So gear your typing fingers up to enter some great giveaways! A huge thank you to the generosity of the companies sponsoring the giveaways: Organic Boutique, Big Skinny, Diamond Earrings, Frecklebox, Lillebaby Eurotote (via Mom Spark and Happy, Healthy Moms Product Review Team) , Progresso (via MyBlogSpark), 77kids (via The Motherhood), EZ Socks, EllaWrap.


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Plantronics Voyager Pro Review

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product in exchange for writing a review. While we consider it a privilege to receive free products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product.

It’s been a long time since we had our Back to School product guide, however, we still have this one last product that we need to write up a review about – the Plantronics Voyager Pro. You have to be careful about these phone accessories because they all are not necessarily compatible with all phones. This was the case with us. Then we decided to get new phones with a new carrier and bingo, the Plantronics Voyager is now compatible with my new phone.

While I don’t consider myself tech savvy, I can usually manage to figure most things out for myself over time. I found that setting up the Plantronics Voyager, which is simply an expensiveBluetooth ear piece that allows you to talk on your cell phone handsfree, took me a day or so to understand how this thing worked and I still have not quite figured out one aspect to it that was installed on my laptop.

That said I thought the Plantronics Voyager Pro was very nice, had good sound, and fairly easy to use once set up. However, for it’s fancy price of $199.95, I thought that it should stay behind my ear better than it does. I wear glasses so because the arm of my glasses sets behind my ear causing the Plantronics ear piece to not set well on top of it. Any slight movement and the Plantronics Pro pops out of place. I have been disappointed and the ear piece has been sitting in the pocket of my shoulder bag ever since. So much for keeping up with technology, eh? But I cannot be fiddling with the ear piece trying to get it to stay in place while driving or typing for that matter. It just isn’t safe or productive use of my time.

Plantronics Voyager Pro UC Retail Price $199.95


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Thirfty Thursday: Hamburger Helper Coupon

After last week’s Thrifty Thursday post about 12 Tips to Save on Groceries, this week we actually have a coupon to share! Thanks to General Mills you can save on a upcoming meal(s). Love Coupons? Hamburger Helper fans you’ll love this too! Just go to the link below for your grocery savings.

Hamburger Helper Coupon


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Marie Callender’s Meals

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product for free through TheMotherhood.com and Marie Callender’s Meals in exchange for writing a review. We are also are receiving a stipend. While we consider it a privilege to receive free products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product and monetary compensation does not affect our views of the product.

We were given four FREE coupons to purchase Marie Callender’s Meals, which are prepared frozen meals found in the freezer section of the grocery store. We bought the Honey Mustard Chicken, Honey Roasted Turkey, Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni & Chicken and finally the Fettuccini with Chicken & Broccoli. We were suppose to offer a couple of them as giveaways, but I have a large family to feed here so we used them all for our family. So what would have cost close to $22.00 for meals only cost us a couple of dollars.

The size of these meals is rather small, but we managed to share them between all nine of us and I was even able to get a taste of each one of the meals. Thankfully there were lunch leftovers to feed to the children who were still hungry after trying Marie Callender’s Meals or else we would have had some hungry little tummies still.

The meals take about an hour to cook, which is a long time considering it is a prepared meal meant to save you some time. My husband and daughter picked these up on their way home from volunteering at a local food pantry, so by the time they got home, the meals were cooked, it was 8:30 that we ate. We were so hungry that I completely forgot to take pictures of the meals! And they didn’t bother to use a couple of pie coupons for dessert, so we were unable to try those and tell you about them in this review. Hopefully, we will pick up pies this week and be able to tell you about those as well.

The Marie Callender’s Meals do not look quite as tasty as the box covers. The Honey Roasted Turkey is featured in such an attractive way that it looks like might almost be eating a Thanksgiving look-a-like, when in reality the potatoes, gravy and turkey were all combined together making it look like a pile of brown mush. Regardless of how it looked, it still tasted amazingly well.

So even though we gobbled up these meals without taking pictures and we were hungry when we ate them, their overall taste was good. I think my favorites were the Fettuccini with Chicken and Broccoli and the Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni & Chicken. I could have eaten more of both and my children were kind enough to leave a second little portion of the Fettuccini before letting their brothers finish it off. The veggies in one were kind of soggy, I thought. I believe it was the Honey Mustard Chicken. Sorry, I ate so fast it’s a bit of a blur now that it is 4:30am.

My husband thought the onions in the Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni & Chicken were too big. Onions are a big turn off to him anyways. He loves the flavor they can give to food, but if they are visible it ruins the meal for him. Therefore, he returned his plate to the kitchen with a pile of onions left on it, while one of our daughters offered to eat the onions for him. 😉

I didn’t hear any complaints from the children and considering there are seven of them, that is a good thing!

Marie Callender’s Meals besides the classics mentioned above, also offer fresh mixers and fresh flavor steamers. And some brand new baked meals that our store did not have: The new meals are a twist on classic comfort food recipes – Vermont White Cheddar Mac & Cheese, Scalloped Potatoes and Ham and Chicken, Spinach and Mushroom Lasagna. Check out their website for more information and to locate stores near you. Our Jewel store did not carry all of the meals.


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Health & Garden Tuesday: Educational Classes

This new Health & Garden Tuesday will encompass all things related to health, nutrition, gardening and even our wee beginning farm adventures, as they relate to our family’s interests. It may just include an article that we read and liked or it may be what we are learning or experiencing in every day life. Please feel free to chime in with your own thoughts and ideas as well.

I have been going to some free educational classes this year. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate Audrey as a person and as a teacher. The first meetings were held at the beginning of the year and the last few were held just this fall. The topic: pure, therapeutic grade essential oils. The classes are very informative, not to mention interesting health education, especially if you do not know a lot about essential oils and how helpful they can be. I attended all of her classes she held this year, which was between 10 and 15, I believe. During the spring classes, I took our two older girls to many of them. They enjoyed them as well. Audrey switches a couple of classes each session so there is some new material covered as well. We are hoping to enjoy gleaning from them again in the new spring session.

This past weekend was the last class, which was on Healing Oils of the Bible. Extremely interesting and so much information to absorb! I should have been posting about each class as we had them, but didn’t think of that until now. I loved learning more about these oils that I had heard about all my life as I was taught the Bible or read it for myself. It was interesting to learn about their life giving properties and how using them can benefit our health. Truly enlightening to say the least. I still haven’t sorted out everything in my brain, so I plan to read over our notes and continue learning and absorbing this great health education.

Audrey’s classes are held in a building on her property called The Oil Drop Inn…. It’s the top of their barn! 🙂 Is it ever cozy though. Very homey and inviting. It’s like her own workshop. I felt a wee bit spoiled as she would always save her big comfy chair for me since I was the only nursing mama in attendance.

I am already looking forward to her spring classes. The amazing thing is that Audrey will travel to teach her classes. She just loves teaching and has been using essential oils for over 10 years. She is also an independent distributor, but has only been one for about 4-5 years. I feel privileged to know her and now have the opportunity to work as part of her downline in the business side of Young Living.


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