Kids and Herps... and a picture

Well my mom introduced me to herps at an early age. She spent summers at a lake house in michigan and would catch turtles and frogs all the time, and passed that on to me :D

I was handling turtles way early, it's pretty hard for a small kid to hurt a turtle if you pay attention. I forget when I held my first snake, but I was catching 'em in my back yard in Houston, and we moved out of that house when I was six.

That pic is awesome. My five year old daughter helps me with our snakes a lot. Not sure when she will get her own, probably three years. She loves to handle them, and has even moved up to tong feeding our smallest bp(which was a big step because she has a pet rat and has to hold one out there for the other animal). She is old enough now I think to get all the sanitary aspects of keeping. Meaning keeping yourself clean before and after snake time and in between snakes, but still too young to understand the finer points of the husbandry. Soon though.