Funny new BP owner story

[silmaril]

So we are one week into life with a BP and I have been lurking on this site A LOT. Due to the profound wisdom of the administrators it took about 4 days for my membership to process so I could post anything. By which time I had read enough of the site that most of my really stupid questions had already been answered. One big question just got answered today, though ... and in a way that some people here might find entertaining.

This is my son's long-desired first snake, and we had done a lot of research. Ball pythons were consistently coming up as one of the snakes recommended for first time owners and kids, but I was sort of pushing for something smaller until I actually saw in person how much gentler and quieter the BPs were.

We settled on a beautiful 2 month old banana ball python last week because he was by about a thousand miles the most gentle, calm, easygoing snake of all the ones we looked at. I scheduled a vet check to make sure everything was good. It was mostly a precaution but there was one thing I was really worried about. I hadn't noticed it when we were in the store, but when I looked at our little guy in better light I noticed a number of tiny little black specks that suddenly made me worry that he might have mites or tics .... some of you already know where this is going, right?

Anyway, I eventually found a YouTube video that explains how the "banana" morph got its name. But not until I had gotten totally worked up about the impending health crisis of our poor mite-infested baby -- and googled every possible horrible snake disease -- and made our long-suffering vet go over every scale with his scope to make sure none of those scary black spots had wriggly legs!

It's really a shame I couldn't post about this until today. You guys would have had so much fun explaining it to me :-)

Just wanted to share that. And also to thank everyone here for the excellent information. Every one of my million questions was answered SOMEWHERE on this site. Pretty awesome. And especially special thanks to whoever wrote the sticky with step by step tank setup. That sticky alone made the difference between struggling with fluctuating temperature and humidity and actually being able to relax and enjoy our new noodle!