Oh yes. But even so, $1 per cookie isn't bad since they increased it to 9 days from 7.
Same here, I'm not willing to use the lab ray on my peophin. Peophin morphing potions are pretty pricey still, and I like his customization and such. Plus my Freezer is species specific, if he changed species, I would need to get a new freezer.
Anyway, as far as training goes. You could try for the boosts if you want, though your HP would be kind of low still then. Though, if you did Kitchen Quests, you might get some extra stat points there. I think I've gone over them in this thread before, but you can complete 10 on-site quests per day, (Kitchen, Edna, snow faerie etc.) all count towards the 10. So you can do 10 Kitchen Quests per day, if you get a stat boost, it'll be 1 point and I do believe it goes to your active pet. So, while you train your Ixi you could also try Kitchen Quests for a few extra points. I think I read somewhere that HP is one of the more common stats awarded. It can give you Strength, Defense and Agility too.
KQs can be pricey and their quest timer is pretty long, usually 2-3 hours. So if there's one you don't want to do, you end up waiting a bit for it to run out so you can try a new one. That being said, I tend to only do them if the total quest price is around 5k or so. Cheap for a stat point at my peophin's level, but the items you get sometimes are often not worth much, and sometimes you only get under 1k in NP back. So, there's that possibility too. Still, it's a relatively cheap way to try to get some extra stat points. If I were into heavy training, I'd do all 10 quests probably regardless of cost, but since I'm only casually training, it's not such a big deal to put a lower limit on the NP on each quest. I'm trying to save up for some stuff too, so there's that.