Questions From a New BP Owner

Heading to bed. I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you have any more questions. Good luck, everything will work out just fine once you get all your equipment.

Hey, sooo more questions, haha. I just fed her and she took to her food really well, I had no trouble getting her to eat even in a new home. So, that's good. But she seemed to have to really stretch her mouth around fuzzies. I don't know if I'm just not used to seeing snakes eat mice or if maybe this is the biggest she can eat right now.

If I offer her something too big for her, will she just refuse or would she try to eat it anyway/would she injure herself doing so? Above all, I wouldn't want her getting hurt.

Also (and for the life of me I can't figure out how to edit my previous post), I'm getting an infrared heat lamp for my cage that can be left on all the time and a dimmer (cause I tried without the light for a while and the temp just got much too low and my current 'black light lamp' isn't high enough wattage to keep the desired temperature), esp since it is having trouble and it's still practically summer here I'd hate to see what happens when it starts getting cold. Since my thermostat won't come in till like Monday, would you guys suggest I maybe try to keep it on the warmer end of the ambient air temperatures from the caresheet (83-84) to try to compensate? I won't be leaving the UTH on unattended anymore till I get the thermostat (she wasn't using the hot hide anyway cause it was too hot), so I don't want her getting too cold with her having just eaten. Sorry I'm a bundle of questions. XD

If the food item is the same size as the widest part of her girth she's fine... they stretch wide to get it down!!! I would leave the uth off completely until the t stat arrives and use the infrared as the hot spot

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If it's a mouse fuzzie it's way to small. You might think the snakes mouth is stretched a lot but you have no idea how far they really do stretch. Feed a prey item the same size as the widest part of the snakes body. Don't worry about the size of the snakes head. Also if you can get a digital scale to weigh your snake it would help a lot for determining the size of prey. Here's a website that has a pretty good list of prey items to feed depending on the snakes weight.

http://www.ballpythonz.net/feeding.html

Yeah just keep the ambient temperature up for now I guess. I know UTH's come with those rubber pegs to raise your tank off of whatever surface you have it on. If you still have those pegs put them on and if you have a thick layer of substrate I'd keep the UTH on.

The UTH instructions said to stick it on the bottom of the tank, so that's what I did, but I could try peeling it off and messing with it. I'll be home all afternoon and she's in my bedroom, so I can keep a close watch on her hotspot to make sure it never gets too hot for her.

I don't have anything that will accurately weigh her, I only have a human scale (pounds with no decimal places). But I'll move her up to rats for sure. I'll see if she'll hold still sometime this weekend to maybe measure her belly to compare to a rat size.

I think once I get my thermostat, I'll be fine. I have my tank now very similar to the 'how to set up a 20 gallon tank' tutorial, save the foil on the top (which I'll see if I need as today goes on, I have the stuff I need to do it but I won't if my air temp and humidity are staying okay) and the thermostat, which is ordered. Sooo I kinda wish I had found that before hand. XD But I think I have everything under control now.

Thank you guys so much for the help. :D