For me the love of reptiles was huge from the get go! I mean huge, I think it really started with my fascination with dinosaurs as early as I could remember. I remember half of my wardrobe being covered in dinosaurs, all of my books were dinosaurs and I had a triassic toybox. It didnt take long before I evolved from dinosaurs to modern day reptiles, there was a lot of overlap and I still love dinosaurs today but not with the same preoccupying fascination i have with modern reptiles. I think what really drew me in was the fact I'd spend all day watching animal planet and national geographic, I think I caught every single walking with dinosaurs special or anything of the sort, and steve irwin was my hero. I didn't watch many cartoons but by god I loved me some animal planet. I think my first contact with reptiles might have been seeing a big ol albino retic at a zoo or museum or something, I don't recall because I was probably 4 or 5 but I have a picture of it draped across my neck with a huge s--t eating grin on my face. When I was probably 7 or 8 I started roaming around the forests and creeks in my neighborhood in ohio searching around for any wildlife. I would mostly find garter snakes and catch them with a good friend, but occasionally a tricky little skink or a few newts. Once in a while I'd find something more exciting, I'm certain that one time when I was probably 9 I caught a venomous cottonmouth or copperhead (i forget which and I dont feel like identifying it now). In this time I owned a fair share of cold blooded friends. I remember having an anole, emerald swift, tree frogs, fire belly newts and toads, an iguana, some kind of awesome big fat brown frog, and a savannah moniter. When I was in middle school I finally got my first ball python, a pastel male I named sonny (like sunny because of his yellow) and I got a second one for my birthday maybe a year later, a normal from my sisters friend who was breeding. I absolutely loved these guys but I was kind of young and dumb, I kept them alive for two years or so and I know they were never underweight, no scale rot mouth rot belly burns or anything noticable to the novice snake owner (with common sense that is....ive seen people oblivious to very obvious things on here, I wasn't ignorant just inexperienced haha). Unfortunately I don't have either of those guys today, I'm really not sure what caused them to die.....mites is one problem I could have ran into i suppose, I didn't know anything about mites at the time but I've never had a problem with mites in my current collection so I can't reflect back and compare to anything. Anyway in the last few years I decided I had to have ball pythons back in my life. It started out buying one pair, a female spider and a male pastel because of course bumblebees are in my opinion one of the most striking beautiful starter morphs, and with the mind blowing array of morphs i was seeing online I thought maybe someday I could breed them. Well the more I researched and attended shows like NARBC (amazing) the further and further I got sucked into the life. I think you guys all know where the story goes from here... Now I have 11 ball pythons I'm keeping and I'll be doing my first pairings this year, very exciting!