My Baby ball python is curled up into a ball outside his hide?

[Zeraxi]

Do not feed it to your snake. It will be a sloppy mess. Wait a week before offering food.

As for holding your snake, it is my RECOMMENDATION that you handle your snake when you first get it. Take pictures, hold your snake, enjoy it, love it. Hold ot as long as you want as long as you keep it at safe temperatures for it (if it's prolonged you want a fairly warm room). Take tons of pictures.

When you are done stressing your snake out for your own selfish reasons and have enough to remember your snake by in pictures and memories, put it in it's enclosure and completely ignore that it exists for a week. Then start feeding it. Continue ignoring it exists until it is consistantly eating (2-3 feedings it eats).

The logic is, you get everything out of your system, you have pictures of the snake, and have the memories. Then you give it a safe place to live, and reinforce that safety by not intruding. Then it starts getting food, and the safety of the enclosure as well as the food delivered to it should help make it comfortable. Then you just try to acclimate it to you until it feels comfortable with you.

Step 1 done. I've handled it quite a bit when it first came. I took pictures too. The enclosure is in my room so i cant like "forget" about the snake. but ill just occasionally look at it. I dont think itll be too stressed as long as i dont touch the enclosure (aside from changing water daily) 3 weeks though... *cries*