I have 9 ball pythons now, I actually had to pull out my feeding chart to see how many I had LOL. I usually try to start feeding day with frozen thawed, almost none of them will eat. Ball pythons want to hunt, they want live food. I actually used to use live mice but found that many times the mice would bite the snakes and that freaked me out. So I've switched to live rat pups. A rat pup will get bigger than an adult mouse before he even first opens his eyes, it's best to feed when they still have their eyes closed. At that point they are so young they can't really see what is going on and they would never bite the snake, especially if the snake misses on the first pass, that's when the mice get really aggressive. Almost all my ball pythons will turn up their nose at frozen thawed and then a minute later go nuts over a live rat pup.
There's a couple down sides to rat pups though. If they don't eat it then you have to have the mother to keep it alive, not really an option unless you plan on breeding rats. And if you do breed the rats they grow so fast that in a couple weeks that baby rat has his eyes open and is a bit more dangerous to feed and is quickly too big for your ball python to eat. Plus you have to be able to feed live rodents, many people are a bit too squeamish for that. I see baby ball pythons starving in pet stores and I wish I could bring in a live rat pup and put it in the cage to save those baby snakes, but most stores think of rodents as pets and won't even sell them as feeders, so the poor baby snakes just starve.
The best thing to do would be to find someone local that breeds rats. I actually started a system with 9 adult females, I put one per week with the male and one rat has babies every week, giving me a steady supply of all different sizes of rats. Of course that means a lot of space for breeders and babies and feeding and cleaning rats quite often, but I do have lots of food my snakes love to eat and it's way cheaper than buying rodents from someone else.
Another option would be to try fresh killed mice. I set up a cheap CO2 chamber to gas my mice and it works like a charm. Ball pythons seem more eager to eat a fresh killed than a frozen thawed for some reason. Actually if you start with a rat pup it gets them really excited, then they will follow up with just about anything for the second meal (within about 30 minutes or so).
You should post a photo of your snake, some do just go off of food at certain times and that's perfectly normal too.
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