New ball owner - Advice?

[Crawdad]

I have a hatchling BP that my wife and I bought about a week ago. It's been about 12 days since his last feeding, so I'm going to try and feed him tomorrow. He's been on live prey all his life, but the owner said that he has never had a problem eating. I'm probably going to feed live this first time (just to make sure he will eat), and then try and introduce F/T over the next month or two. I'm concerned about feeding in the aspen -- this is my first snake, so stories of bedding causing impaction sort of scare me. Is putting down some paper towels before I release the mouse enough to help, or am I worrying about it too much?

He seems to be enjoying his new home, though -- I have him in a Sterilite tub now, with a ZooMed UTH mat on one side, controlled by a rheostat (for now). Hot spot temps stay around 92-95 at the bottom of the tub, and cool spot stays around 75-79 ambient air temp. No hygrometer yet (soon), so I don't know the humidity levels, but I live in Alabama, which is very humid most of the time anyway.

I've got 3 hides in the box, and a water dish, 2 of the hides are paper towel rolls with one of the ends covered off with paper, and one is a small coffee stirrer box. He doesn't like to get under this one (I think it's probably a little large for him at this point), but he likes to get on top of it and try and escape . He absolutely loves the paper towel rolls, though -- with the way I have the end covered, it probably pretty closely mimics a mouse hole. He huddles down at the very end of the tube when he's sleeping.

The first few days he hid through the day, and then explored every inch of his enclosure during the nights, I swear. After that, he settled down, and has spent the past few nights with his head stuck out of his hide, like he's waiting for a mouse to run by . I'm hoping he'll be good and hungry when time to feed comes.

He pooped and passed some urates on the second day, which I'm taking to be a good sign. Should I?

We haven't handled him at all yet, aside from when we were buying him. He seemed very calm at the time, even when passed between me, my wife, and his owner a few times. We're going to give him a full week, then feed him (hopefully), and give him 48 hours before we try to pull him out for the first time.

Thanks for the advice, and thank you for this site! I've been poring over it for the past few weeks, even before we had settled on a ball python. I've learned more about snake husbandry than I've ever thought I would, just in the past few days. This is such a valuable resource.