A long overdue update.

It's been quite a while since I've posted! I have a terrible memory, so I have idea on timing, but some time after my last post, I decided to stop the raw diet and go back to kibble. We were dealing with vomiting 2-3 times per week. I tried my best and never could figure out why. Sometimes she'd produce only bile, which I attributed to "hunger pukes" and learned to adapt her schedule to prevent that from happening. Still, she would sometimes vomit her meal 2-3 hours after eating. This frequently happened as we were either getting ready for bed or already in bed. My husband was not thrilled with this, and I'll admit I wasn't either. I tried varying her diet, and I tried to figure out which foods were most likely to cause upset. I never could figure it out.

In addition to that, my job was becoming more demanding, and making the time to prepare raw meals was becoming a hassle. Call me lazy, but I missed the convenience of kibble. Granted, that was not my reason for stopping the raw diet, but it was an influencing factor. Raw feeding takes a lot more work, and I didn't have enough time to make sure it was done properly. In order to make raw feeding economical, it requires buying larger pieces and portioning/prepping them yourself, and that was getting harder to do. I also found myself forgetting to thaw things in time, so I was sometimes stuck running out at the last minute to buy meat, or feeding her half frozen meals.

So, Mona has been on kibble for probably two years now at least. She does well. We have no vomiting to speak of. I rotate her food with the purchase of each new bag. I stick with a few preferred (grain-free) brands that I trust, but never buy the same bag twice in a row. Most frequently Mona is eating Earthborn Holistic, Nutri-Source, Merrick, or Natural Balance. Were she the kind of sensitive dog who became itchy or had other reactions to commercial dog food, I probably would have worked harder to make raw feeding work. As it is, though, Mona does wonderfully with regular dog food, and the time it saves me convinces me it's worth staying with for now.

For now, I'm trying to focus more on documenting day-to-day life. You can read more about that at my other blog, ourholmestead.blogger.com.