A wild lurker appears!

[Tinyhounds]

Hey everybody!

I've been a skulky occasional lurker on both bp.net and cornsnakes.com off and on for about 12 years now. Ive only recently become a career lurker (since August) because my darling daughter turned 7.

My adorable little girl has been asking me for a pet snake since she was 3. At the time, I told her she wasn't old enough, and that she needed to wait until she was older. "How old?" She asked. "Seven." I responded arbitrarily, with the fatal confidence that a three year old would never hold on to that information for four years.

For the next four years, she did research on her grandma's iPad about snakes. She watched YouTube videos about pet snakes and wild snakes. A lot of BHB videos, and decided she wanted a ball python. I tried to push her towards a cornsnakes, only because I had had corns myself in the past and was more familiar with their needs. (I'm not an idiot- I knew that if I bought a 7 year old a snake, it was a pet I was getting for myself).

Fast forward a bit to her 7th birthday. I've done my research, I get a great deal on the supplies, and we take her to the pet store about a month in advance, to see if she will even hold a snake. (She's a bit of a chicken about a lot of things). She had zero problems with it, and was extremely gentle. So a month later we got little Evie.



Evie has been a great eater. She had one problem shed, so I researched some more, changed up our habitat a bit, including switching from aspen to forest floor and covering part of the top of the tank with foil, and I'm happy to announce, she just had a full one piece shed two days ago!!! She's looking prettier than ever!!!



But wait! There's more!

About a month later, we came across a ball python that was very thin. In order to protect what I truly believe were not horrible intentions, I'm being vague about some details here. The owner was trying to feed the ball python (who was not small, though as I said, quite thin) f/t fuzzies, and she had been refusing. I work as a vet tech, so I thought, at the very least, I could take the snake to the vet for and exam, and have her dewormed. (My husband was unaware that I was growing our snake family at this point). So I did that, and that's how we got Anathema. Though, it's also worth pointing out, that once I got her home, into a bigger tank, raised her temperatures, raised her humidity, and offered her a weaned rat and a tiny bit of privacy, she snapped it right up. I am in no way a seasoned snake expert. This was all advice that I found either here on the forums, or from my local herp guy at our reptile store or from my reptile vet. But she's doing pretty well now. She's much a much shyer snake than Evie, and prefers to just chill in her mailing tube, but it's pretty rewarding to see her cruising around her tank. We've recently had to go out and get her a 40 gallon, since I felt like her 20 gallon long wasn't quite big enough for her. I'm working on cluttering up the 40 now.



You can see she's got a bit of a scar over her eye. That's been there since she came home to us. I'm not sure if it'll go away with enough sheds or not. I also love this skull marking she has on her side:



Anyway- sorry if this was just incredibly long winded- I really love these guys. They are all doing extremely well. All? Wouldn't two just be both? Glad you asked! Here's a picture of my corn Misha butt-munching a pinky mouse! Misha was a total accident. But since I couldn't talk my daughter into letting me have another corn.... my poor husband... he's made me promise not to bring home anymore reptiles until the expo next July. (He didn't say anything about fish- my tank is flourishing)








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