Stella & Dot Review and $100 Gift Card Giveaway (ENDED)

Winner is comment #187!

Happy New Year! What a great year last year was and I am looking forward to a brand new year full of fun and excitement! To kick start the new year, I am writing a review and hosting one $100 gift card giveaway to one of my lucky readers to my favorite jewelry store: Stella & Dot. If you are a faithful fashion and celebrity magazines follower like me, I am sure you have seen Stella & Dot jewelery pieces featured in them before. Robin, my Stella & Dot stylist, sent me 2 fantastic necklaces to review.



The first necklace was The Happy Flower Necklace. This necklace was featured in Lucky Magazine and Better Homes & Garden.

I could show you a photo of me wearing it. But frankly, I am not as pretty as Ali Landry, so I think I should have her to show you how pretty the necklace looks on!

The other necklace I received was the Bloom Flower Necklace.

I love that you can wear it with the flower in front for a more up town look.

Or the flower in the black for a more classic look -- prefect with your little black dress!

The two necklaces I received to review are bold, fun with a classic twist to it. It reminds me of Grandma's jewelry, but with an updated look to them. These necklaces are definitely for someone who wants to make a statement. I love that you can wear really simple things like a plain black dress and wear these type of necklaces to dress it up!


If bold necklaces are not your thing, do not worry. The company also offers a great selection of pretty earrings.

Beautiful bracelets!

And dazzling rings!

With the wide selection that Stella & Dot offers, I am sure everyone will find something they love to own from it. Didn't get what you want for Christmas? Well, it is time to pick something up for yourself from Stella & Dot. Valentine's Day is around the corner, it is not too early to drop hints about what you want! So, head on over to Stella & Dot and find something you would like to buy.

Robin of Stella & Dot has generously offered one $100 gift card to one of my lucky readers! (US residences only please)

How to enter:

1.) Please go to Stella & Dot and leave me a comment to tell me what 2 items you would love to own.

How to earn additional entries (please leave a separate comment for each additional entry):

2.) Become a follower on my blog (publicly- privately does not count)-leave another comment to let me know that you have become a follower. To follow me, click on the "Follow" button on the right hand side of my blog. Follower earns 1 additional entry.

3.) Blog about my giveaway- with a link back to here, when you leave the comment make sure you include the URL of where your post of my giveaway is. Contest ends January 14th at 11:59pm PST. Blogging about my giveaway earns 1 additional entry.

4.) Add me as a friend on Facebook (click on "Sugar Pop Ribbons" under facebook badge on the right hand side of my blog). Adding me to Facebook earns 1 additional entry.

5.) Grab my button and tell me where it is make sure to leave an url address so I can check it. Grabbing my button is worth 3 additional entries.

6.) Become a fan of Stella & Dot on Facebook is worth 1 additional entry.

7.) Follow Stella & Dot on Twitter for 1 additional entry.

Important stuff:

* Lucky Winner will be chosen from True Random Number Generator.

* Anonymous comments must include an email address. For example: sugarpopribbons (@) yahoo.com -- so that I may get in touch with you if you are selected to win the giveaway.

* Please come back to this post on January 15th, 2010. I will announced who the winner is. You will have 48 hours to respond to my email about getting your awesome giveaway prize to you. If the winner does not reply to my email within 48 hours, I will choose another winner using the True Random Number Generator.

Playdate is great on a rainy day

We had planned to meet up with our friends at the park today. Then, my friend Nancy called me to inform me that it was raining (I slept in this morning, so I had no clue). We could not take the kids to the park because of the rain. Since the kids already knew about the park playdate and they were expecting to see their friends, we decided to meet up at Nancy's house instead. The rain did not stop the kids from having fun indoors, of course. Nancy and baby Ryan.

The kids played and when we got hungry, we decided to call for pizza instead of dragging all of the kids out to the rain to grab food.

The kids had a blast playing with each other & I had a wonderful time hanging out with the mommies for some much needed adult conversations ^_^.

OMG, I just realized that even though DD is the youngest, she is actually the tallest. Leila (center) is 1 year older than DD. Savahanna (on the right) is 2 months older than DD. Sometimes I forget what a giant my daughter is!

My final cake! Hooray!

I finished last class of course 1 of cake making today! This is what my final cake looks like. Each course has 4 lessons. In the first lesson, I learned how to cover my cake with icing. It was not hard, but it took a long time to cover my cake with icing and make sure everything is nice and smooth. In the second class, I learned how to do some borders. Then, in the third class, we started learning how to do the beginning part of a rose with more borders. Finally, today, we learned how to do the rest of rose and shell borders. Don't worry, this is not a month old cake :P. I made a new cake for each class every week. I could not believe how hard it was to make the rose, it took me an hour to make these 5 sad little roses. I remember watching a cake decorating show and they make it look so easy. Well, as someone who has just tried making the roses, I can assure you that it is not easy at all. I now have a new found respect for people who make cakes with pretty roses on them. I am starting course 2 next week. We will be learning how to make a cake with basket borders and also learning a lot of other flowers. I am excited but also a bit nervous because I am pretty horrible at making roses so I don't know if I will be bad at making the other flowers too.

Disney On Ice

DH won 2 Disney On Ice tickets from work so I was able to take DD to the show the day after Christmas. Because it was only two tickets, we could not all go, it was just me and DD, but I think DH was secretly thankful that he did not have to go with us. The show started with Mickey and Minnie.
And then came Donald Duck and Goofy.

The cars from Cars were in the show too.

They did a 30 minutes icing skating show with the Little Mermaid story line.

This was when DD began to lose interest and wanted to know where Snow White was?!

The next part of the snow was the Lion King. DD has never seen Lion King before, so she definitely had no interest at this point.

Luckily, during the break she discovered something that really interested her. Shaved Ice! This was the most expensive shaved ice I ever purchased! $14! I kid you not! $12 for the cup with the shaved ice and $2 for the spoon/straw. Normally I don't like to buy things at shows because I think they are way over priced. However, because we did not pay for the tickets or parking (DH's company covered that too), so I splurged and brought DD the shaved ice she wanted.

Despite it being expensive, it was worth the money because it kept DD entertained for the rest of the show.

The second half of Disney On Ice was all about Tinker Bell. I think they did it to promote the new Tinker Bell movie that was released a couple of months ago.

Tinker Bell flying in the air.

I like the different fairies and their flower umbrellas.

This was when the show wrapped up.

While it was a nice show, but I think DD was a bit too young for it. She would have probably enjoyed it more when she is at least 5 years old. I still glad that we went, it was a nice change to our not so exciting daily routine and now we know to wait for a couple of years to take her to show like this.

Christmas photos

We went to grandparents' house for Christmas eve. It's their family tradition to open gifts on that night, so that's what we did. Even though this was DD's third Christmas, she still needed her daddy's help opening gifts. DD ripped off pieces of the wrapping paper and then her daddy would unwrap the rest for her.

Her favorite gift this year was a puzzle set that came from the 99 cent store. That just goes to show you that kids don't need expensive gifts to have fun.

DD played with her puzzles for hours (putting it together and taking it apart over and over again).

On Christmas day, we went to DH's sister's house for lunch. Here's DD all ready to leave the house. She refused to give up her Kimochis kitty.

We did not want her to take her Kimochis kitty because she won't go to sleep without it, and the last thing we need is for her to lose her cat. So, we ended up allowing her to take her mermaid to the Christmas lunch.

Diana's dog, baby, was locked out the whole time we were there. Poor thing!

After we had our lunch, DD decided that it was time to burn off her energy by dancing around in the living room.

Lunch with daddy and cooking with mommy

For lunch today, we took DD out to lunch. Whenever we go out to eat together as a family, DD always wants to sit with her daddy, today was no exception. DH watched on as DD played with her toys. Going out to eat with toys is a good thing.

After we got home from lunch, DD and I made some dessert together. My friend Lara had given me a recipe for making candy cane chocolate. I took the wrappings off 1 dozen candy canes, and DD used a hammer to smash them into little pieces.

Holding up the bag to show me what a great job she did.

We then went into the house to start making dessert.

We melted 1 bag of white chocolate, and then we added the candy canes.

After we were done mixing everything, I gave the spoon to DD and she was not too sure about licking it at first.

One lick and she was in heaven!

Look at the smile on her face.

ROFL! I think she wished that she could put the entire spoon into her mouth.

White chocolate and candy cane. Yum, yum!

I pour the white chocolate with candy cane on a cookie sheet and then put it in the fridge to harden it. After 30 minutes, I broke it into little pieces. It actually tasted pretty good. DD loves it, DH thought it was too sweet and I have to agree with him. I think it will be good with a cup of hot tea or coffee though :).

DD got so tired of standing up, she eventually sat down to finish licking the spoon. LOL!