So we have a new addition to our little family. We introduce... Little Foot! The baby wandering garter snake, Thamnophis elegans vagrans, that stumbled into our lives on August 5, 2010. My friend Clare and I found him in the garage, and my awesome hubby let me keep him. In this picture he is holding my finger while sleeping *awww*. So my husband and I have been taking care of this little guy since. He was a newborn, (when Clare and I found him, she claimed he still had his "beak") and when I took him into a few pet stores, I had confirmation from them that Little Foot couldn't be more than a few days old. I had been SOOOOOOO stressed out because we couldnt get LF to eat ANYTHING! We got him crickets, worms (night crawlers that were three times his size which we cut accordingly), guppies, cat food (thanks clare for giving us a can), and I actually called up this lady that just had garter snake babies to ask her what she did, and after obtaining her advice, I tried to hold his head and force feed him the guppies. OH I felt so terrible after because he was so scared afterwards, and was mad at me for a little while after that. I handle him daily, and he's become accustomed to being held. You just hold your hand in front of his face, he'll make eye contact with you, and slither right on to your hand! Who would have thought! He's more tame than Hammy is.

And today was the first day I could sigh relief, because he finally ate! Goodness, I was so shocked. Last night, my hubby and I drove for about an hour to get a pinky mouse (newborn). It looked exactly like the name sounds like. It was small and pink. I had a hard time with it, trying to be vegan and all (my sister says I'm a bad vegan for this), but I found it more humane to freeze the poor thing, and THEN feed it to LF. But LF is far too small to eat the whole pinky, so I had to decapitate it. I shivered at the act. It has to be the most morbid thing I'd ever done in my life! I don't think I'd ever purposely killed an animal (minus the spiders and other bugs that I find inside the house) before. I felt like such a horrible person, feeling sick to my stomache and I was shaky because I felt so terrible. But I fed the pinky's head to LF, and he went for it without hesitation! I should have tried to feed him pinkies before we spent all that time and money on other things! What is silly about this little guy (I actually think Little Foot is a girl, because of the pattern of scales by the anus as well as the shape of the tail being long and slender instead of being short and stubby) is that he likes the water. LF drank lots of water. Stuck his face in his water bowl and moved his head back and forth (washing his face I called it). And that wasn't enough, so he got entirely into the water bowl and started swimming around (taking a bath now). Silly isn't it? Little Foot likes to wash up after meals.

Makes me smile.