Pawalla March 2013 Box

So when the box arrived, it was by the front door and I had the hardest time getting Shiva to stay indoors while I retrieve it and he's normally really well behaved. Anyhow... February's box was a hit with the minions so I (and the kittens, apparently) were looking forward to their next box.

Shiva was already attacking the catnip toy. Each time we open up this box, we have to hide it so we could take pictures before they come up and drag the toy out. 

So first up is the food -- I was surprised to see two large cans instead of the regular 4 small cans. The cans are from Canine Caviar and it's the Green Venison Tripe. At first I was a bit wary since this looked like it was just for dogs, but with previous Pawalla picks, cats can eat it as well. Since the kittens eat periodically throughout the day, I split it up into three servings. As I write this now, they are on their second helping gulping it down. It's been a hit! 

In this section, there's the Bench & Field Holistic Natural Feline Treats, Pet Greens Crunchy Cat Treats, and Natural Balance Perfect Bites Salmon Treats. I haven't opened them yet since they are still getting through the treats they got last month. I am familiar with the Pet Greens from living with cats previously so I was quite happy with what I got.

Finally we got a can of catnip which I was really happy to get because we actually don't have any catnip right now. I especially like that it comes in a tin which means we can easily reuse it. 

Pawalla February 2013 Box

Sometime in between getting the first Pawalla box, I ended up screwing up an order of food for the kittens from Petco. Hilarity did not ensue when four giant bags of food showed up at our door, so we ended up cancelling the next Pawalla box in order to figure out the food situation. As it turns out though,the kittens got through most of their first box (and a giant bag of food) so we figured that a second Pawalla box would be worth it since... well, between 3 cats, we'd likely get through everything.

Anyhow, this post is just to show you what we got in the box. As it happens, just before I got home, I stopped off at the pet store and picked up some wet food based on the Canned Cat Food Spreadsheet (basically it shows you what some of the canned foods look like). I ended up grabbed three cans of Merrick cat food (Ocean Breeze, California Roll, and New England Boil) and one can of Dick Van Patten's Natural Balance L.I.D. Duck & Green Pea Canned Formula. This came about when we realized how quickly they were getting through their cans of Wellness Kitten food. I'll probably have a follow-up later to tell you how the kittens received this particular box since they haven't tried the food yet. (And if you're wondering, the first box [January 2013] was a hit).

I'll apologize in advance for the photograph quality; my camera is on it's last leg so I've ordered a new one, but I really wanted to share the contents today. Inside this month's box was the following items:

• 4 Cans of "By nature 95% Protein Food For Cats
• 95% Chicken and Chicken Liver
• 95% Oceanfish
• 95% Turkey and Turkey Liver
• 95% Salmon, Mackerel, and Sardines
• Grizzly Salmon NuTreats for Cats
• Primal Jerky Chicken Nibs
• The Honest Kitchen Grace
• Grizzly Salmon Oil for Cats
• Spot Cute Critters Catnip Toys

While opening of the box; Shiva couldn't stay away from the catnip toys and when I finally "set them free" and allowed the cats to play with them, the older cat came running over and ran off with one. The toys were clearly a hit with them.

The food is interesting; I don't know how the kittens will like it but earlier today when I was at the pet store earlier and I was trying to find the specific brands that I picked according to the spreadsheet, I saw this brand that they were unpacking. I didn't want to grab too many new brands for the kittens so I made a mental note to try it the next one. I was quite happy to see it in their box when I got home.

Honest Kitchen already exists in this house (though my roommate uses Prowl) and the kittens love to steal a bit of the Prowl. I was definitely glad to see this in the box so that they could have their own version of it.

Primal Jerky... well, up until a few hours ago, I hadn't ever heard of this before. When I saw it in the box, I figured that they would like it since they seem to like these variety of things. My roommate came over shortly thereafter and gave a bag of Primal Treats Freeze Dried Turkey Liver Munchies Treats for Cats and Dogs (which she got in the PetFlow's Spoiled Rotten Box for this month). They loved the liver version so I imagine that the Jerky Chicken Nibs will be well received by them.

The last two items were both from Grizzly that I am unfamiliar with. The concept I am no stranger to, but just the brand (which really isn't a problem for me. The NuTreats and the Salmon Oil are things that we're going to have to wait to see if they take to or not.

The Cat Food Debacle

Since getting the minions I've been proactive about getting new information specifically regarding food from both Reddit and Cat Forum. One of the big topics that I try to keep informed about is food. 

The shelter that the minions came from said that feed the cats and dogs Halo food. So when we went to check out food options, we decided to go with Spot's Stew since it's the only one that is grain free. (Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of other brands that carry grain free, it's just that Halo has one grain free dry food and luckily the kittens love it).

The vet said that while a dry diet was fine, we should be giving them a bit of actual kitten food rather than something that was for all life stages only because they needed more fattier substances but it turns out that grain free kitten food is actually kind of hard to find.

Now before I can get to what we did find, Shiva got sick shortly after so it was a scramble to get him food that he could find. Turns out that kittens (or cats) when sick aren't always able to find their food so warming up a bit of wet food (about 5 seconds in the microwave) helped Shiva find his food. It wasn't the greatest solution but it worked. In our scramble to find wet food though we ended up getting a few cans of Iams ProActive Health Kitten Premium Pate with Gourmet Chicken.

I wasn't exactly thrilled to be making such sudden changes to Shiva's diet so I tried to find another type of food. I ended up stumbling upon Newman's Own Organic Cat Food and figured that I'd work that in with the two of them.

Overall, they enjoyed both foods but weren't in love with them. It also didn't help that Shiva was very sick and Hiro was also a bit sick. After they finished the few cans we got, we headed over to Pet Food Express to see what other options we had for them.

Did I mention that it's a bit difficult to find kitten food that is grain free? After hanging out in the store (for what seemed like forever), we finally decided to get Lotus. We tossed a few cans in our cart and just as we were about to walk away, Wellness caught our eye. Lo and behold, Wellness has a kitten formula that is grain free! We grabbed a few cans of that too.

After seeing how the kittens go to town on food, I'd say Lotus and Wellness are the winners here (in terms of wet food). The Lotus cans are a bit smaller but the food disappears almost before I can leave the plate. They love the Wellness just as much, but the Lotus food comes out on top.

I think the great thing though is how well they have handled the mix of foods lately. They still love their Halo which is a staple of their diet but it's great to see them flit between Lotus and Wellness without experiencing too much of a disruption.

I still don't know exactly what is best for them though -- we try to balance their diet between dry and wet foods along with treats and along with their vets approval, I think we've been doing alright. 

New Gaming Toys

I bought myself the Xbox 360 Afterglow Controller and my boyfriend got me the SteelSeries Siberia V2 in purple. It's almost like I'm a real gamer... you know, once I get over the whole motion sickness thing.

Black Sneakers

Okay, before I decided to wear more colours, my standard outfits were black, gray, and white shirts (or any combination of those colours) with blue jeans. For a while my custom Converses (in those colours) worked out very well except that the padding isn't very good on Chucks. So I decided to upgrade a few years ago and opted for the Nike Air Force One's in all black. They were certainly awesome, but I started to take the advice of my friend Leo who mentioned that I should try to replace them every 6 months (or a year, which ever came first). 

It came time to replace them and I wanted all black sneakers again since it was easier to coordinate with them. Since I bought my North Face Hedgehogs off of ShoeBuy, I figured I'd try there first. I ended up coming upon the Kalso line of shoes and sneakers which looked really interesting (aside from seeming to have a food philosophy).

I did check around some more and ended up purchasing the Earth Exer-Trainer 2 Sneakers from the Sierra Trading Post. Upon receiving them, not only was the "negative heel" (basically there is a 3.7° incline), I also noticed that the soles were biodegradable which made me very interested in trying to stick to more eco-friendly options. So when it came time to replace the old shoes, I looked to the Kalso line again.

This time round I decided on two: Kalso Earth Exer-Walk Shoes and Kalso Earth Prosper Shoes. Now I haven't tried out the Prosper shoes just yet but I have been wearing the Exer-Walk shoes since I got them and I love them. They feel a bit more sturdier than the Exer-Trainers -- though we'll see how it pans out in the future.

Overall, I really like the Kalso Earth line (although the branding confuses me since sometimes they are listed as: Kalso Earth, Earth, and Earthies. You can check out the website to see everything that they have and it's a pretty good selection. The Prosper shoe is actually vegan, which is nice.

Just a note: The Exer-Trainer didn't have good reviews but I still sprang for them anyway since I it matches my wardrobe much better. They were great so when I saw the reviews for the Exer-Walk, I wasn't deterred and frankly, they've been great (even better) than the Trainers.

And don't forget to check Ebates! I purchase almost all my sneakers online and I always go through Ebates*.

* Denotes a referral link.

Preparing for Disney World

I've been meaning to write this post for a while but... life happens. Anyhow, last month for my birthday, my boyfriend and I decided to go to Disney World. My parents were super awesome (yes, super awesome) about it and after we booked our flight and car, they actually gifted us their timeshare to use. For context purposes, we purchased our tickets in August and then I promptly spent the following months immersing myself in all things Disney.

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The Tickets

We ordered our tickets online through Undercover Tourist and had them shipped to us. They arrived in a timely manner and we had no issues at all with them. We should have opted to get our Islands of Adventure tickets also from there but at the time, we were still on the fence about whether we were going to go or not. The website says that you should allow up to 10 business days if you're in the United States and a few days more if you're not within the States, so make sure you plan accordingly (or be prepared to pick them up in Orlando).

The Restaurants

We waited till September to start booking the restaurants. Truth be told, I might have skipped this step entirely (and found my hopes dashed) if I wasn't paying attention to the Disney subreddits. Around that time, news about the Be Our Guest restaurants was coming out and when the first day for reservations started, that particular restaurant was booked immediately. I decided that it would be in our best interest to book in advance and I'm awfully glad we did. 

Through the DW Dining Reservations, we picked our restaurants and since we didn't have Park Hoppers, we knew that we'd be in particular parks each day. Which meant that our picking of the restaurants dictated what parks we'd be in. Luckily we knew that of the restaurants we chose (for lunch and dinner), only two actually had a no-show fee whereas all others ask that you cancel out of kindness to other guests (rather than just not showing up and not cancelling). 

Day	Park	Lunch	Dinner
Sunday	Magic Kingdom		The Crystal Palace
Monday	Animal Kingdom		Rainforest Café
Tuesday	Epcot	Biergarten Restaurant	Coral Reef Restaurant*
Wednesday*	Hollywood Studios*	Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater*	The Hollywood Brown Derby*

For any asterisks present, that means we ran into some issues with the planning of this. Let's start with Coral Reef -- sometime after we booked the reservation, we also realized that Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party was happening and it was on the day of my birthday. So we decided that we'd do it (even though it's a separate entrance fee) but forgot that we had a dinner reservation that night. Well... that night we ended up eating cookies, hot chocolate, and apple slices for dinner at that party.
For Wednesday, due to some mishaps with trying to meet up with my cousin who lives in the area, we ended up switching everything to Thursday. While the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater was easily able to accomodate us on Thursday without advance notice, the Hollywood Brown Derby has a no-show fee (the other restaurant being The Crystal Palace to have the same fee) so we called them on Wednesday to try to get it switched and they were greatly accommodating. It turns out that if we tried to cancel it, we would have had to paid the fee, but switching it to another day circumvented that fee. Pin Trading So something I've always kind of wanted to do since my previous visit to Disney World (and subsequent trips to Disneyland) was to start pin trading. But back when I was 15, my parents either said "You're too old," or "This is a phase," or "It costs too much," which all seemed like legit reasons. Even during my last two trips to DL, I found myself saying the same exact thing. But then I realized that Stitch was a pin mainstay and he's my favourite character of all time (not really, but he's pretty up there).  Now when I first got my Stitch Starter Set back in July, I kind of just figured that I'd be trading at DL the next time that we went. Getting started at Disney World is... well, let's just say I wasn't prepared. But then I wasn't really sure what to expect. Overall, it was a lot of fun albeit frustrating at times due to the scrappers. I ended up just purchasing whole packs such as the red version of the Stitch starter set. Toward the end of the trip when I was able to trade for a Storm Trooper pin, I ended up giving it along with a few tradeables for my boyfriend to get started. Which made the whole "hunting down pins" thing a bit more enjoyable since we were doing it together. He ended up getting quite a few pins that really commemorated the trip. Souvenirs
I'm not going to talk about the souvenirs that we brought back, but rather some of the ideas that was floating around before we went (and even some thereafter). While we got a few ideas from Mouse Savers, we took great care in trying to preserve all our maps, pamphlets, and tickets.  In addition to the basics, we got ourselves our "commemorative badges" right away. While my boyfriend got his "First Visit" badge, I got the "Birthday" badge and we wore it every single day. We also played the game of trying to see who got the most reaction out of the badges. Whereas I won that one, he won the "most compliments on clothing" one. :) Back to that point of preserving maps though... while you can order a free planning DVD from Disney, I think the greatest thing we got in the planning phase were some customized maps. We didn't take these maps with us, but we did keep them at home and recently we found a frame for them. Now part of the problem is that they are double sided which means you'd likely have to order them twice if two of your favourite parks end up on the same side and you can only order them every 6 months. But they are quite beautiful and now we know that we have two sets (the fancy ones we got customized or the ones we actually used in the parks) if we ever feel like switching them out from the frame.

H&S Meets Pawalla

On Wednesday I got my first monthly subscription box ever and of course, it was not for me, but for my little minions. (The only other subscription box I subscribed to was for my boyfriend and that was the Loot Crate*, which maybe I'll review later). I've always kind of been on the fence about getting one for myself (even though I am around a monthly subscription all the time) and the closest I'd ever gotten was narrowing it down to the Conscious Box. But when the kittens arrived, I decided that now was the time (partially because I wanted something that could keep them occupied).

While there is a few different pet subscription boxes, there are very few intended for cats. Which strike me as odd since I'm trying to find a way of getting my kittens new toys every month or so to keep them entertained. There is Pawalla*, Best Friend Box, and Spoiled Rotten though. After I decided to try out  Pawalla and my roommate decided to give Spoiled Rotten a shot (I only mention this because when I was deciding, I didn't even know about Spoiled Rotten).

What swayed me to try Pawalla over Best Friend Box was because I don't really want treats in the box. I would definitely prefer to have a box with some foods (not a lot, but a mix of wet food and dry) but I specifically want more toys. The bright side though is that if I ended up getting things that none of the three cats liked, then we could likely donate them to the shelter. So what really made the decision a bit easier? FloppyCats. Seriously. Here's the reviews for Best Friend Box, Pawalla, and Spoiled Rotten that all feature the adorable Trig and Charlie.

As for myself, I loved the presentation on the Pawalla box -- everything is nicely packaged and it's such a great experience just opening the box. The kittens were all over the box... well, because it's a box. Upon opening it though, they were entranced. 

Now as they are still young and still unfamiliar with a lot of sounds, I was actually able to check everything that arrived before they got wind of it actually being their belongings. In the January 2013 box we received:

• Loopies Stripes Stick
• 4 Lotus Natural Foods Canned Pâté
• Cat-Man-Doo Life Essentials Freeze Dried Chicken
• Stella & Chewy's Carnivore Crunch
• Petchup Meowstard
• JMK Litter Bags

Impression? I love it. The kittens took hold of the Loopies Stripes Stick immediately which allowed me time to review the content of the box.

As for the food, my boyfriend and I are trying to balance the kittens diet with wet food and we are specifically looking to keep them on a grain free diet. When they got sick the closest stores that carried kitten wet food only had Iams Kitten Premium Pate Canned Cat Food which while we didn't want to give them, kind of had too. Shortly after we made a haul of canned food and ended up getting a bunch from Lotus (and a few cans of Science Diet Kitten Tender Chicken Dinner).

The Freeze Dried Chicken was an absolute hit. We've been trying to figure out how to give them treats (especially since they are so young) without allowing them to overindulge. This fits the bill perfectly.

I'm still on the fence about the Carnivore Crunch and the Meowstard. The Carnivore Crunch explicitly states that it's for dogs but I read from various places online that it's good for both cats and dogs. I'm probably going to double check with Pawalla just to be on the safe side. The Meowstard is an interesting concept that I'm kind of excited to try out but I don't know how they will react (since they seem to love their Halo dry food quite a bit). I'm not ready to try it out just yet since the kittens are still taking L-Lysine supplements and since they are just getting better from their ailments, I'd rather not introduce entirely new things just yet.

Pawalla costs $26 a month, Best Friend Box costs $30 a month, and Spoiled Rotten (by PetFlow) costs $25 a month. If you know of any more out there, let me know because I'd love to explore more options for the kittens.

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* Because I'm terrible at conversions, those links are specifically referral links. But let's be real, you aren't going to click them anyway.