Oh this should be a fun thread! Thanks for posting!

I've pretty much always loved all animals for as long as I can remember. As a part of that, I would occasionally catch snakes when I was a kid. Some of them I kept for 5 minutes, some for longer, but I never really had a pet snake. Just about every other kind of pet, though!

In college, I volunteered for the nearby zoo. One of the things we were allowed to do was take out certain "contact animals" for the public to see up close, and even touch. These contact animals included a few ball pythons. I really loved taking them out because they were small enough and slow moving enough they were very easy to handle while walking around and giving a big percentage of my attention to the people I was talking to, and also these same factors helped me to convince timid people that the snake really was ok and it wouldn't hurt them if they touched its tail. During that period, I told myself I'd get one as a pet eventually.

Eventually took rather longer than expected, and I'd pretty much forgotten the idea. Then one day my husband and I were furniture shopping with 2 girls in tow who were understandably bored with the process. We were at a strip mall that had 2 furniture stores in it. As we walked from one to the other, we passed a pet store. We decided to go in and look around, just to give the kids something that interested them more. Pretty soon, we were holding a ball python, and both girls and my husband were quite enchanted with it...until my husband saw a mite crawling on his arm which made us give the snake back and leave that store in a hurry. But the idea had been revitalized in my mind and planted in theirs. Within about a month, after lots of research, we had picked up our first normal bp girl. About 6 months later, we got a corn, also. And within about a year, we'd decided we wanted to try breeding, and bought a male of each species. Over the years we've acquired quite a few snakes, but life got in the way of our original breeding plans. Finally, just a week ago, 7 years after we got the first BP, we hatched out our first clutch...corns. SO HAPPY!