New Owner, New Dragon, Rough Start

Hi, everyone!

I'm a new beardie owner who thought she did her research before she adopted this amazing girl, but apparently, I was a victim of misinformation. The gentleman at the exotic pet store we went to also confirmed my misinformation as fact, which is odd, as that place has an amazing reputation among experts even.

We basically got her the wrong substrate, wrong lighting setup, and haven't been feeding her properly. Yikes! But we've educated ourselves now with a handy 22-page guide we picked up from the bearded dragon subreddit, and we're going to fix our mistakes. As we've only had her for about a week, we figure the damage we did was minimal (thank goodness).

That being said, we adore our Princess Rainbow. She's extremely outgoing, loves to be held (she's slept on my chest since the first night we got her, though I put her back in her enclosure when I go to bed), she loves her baths, she seems to trust us implicitly, and she's made friends with the cats (though ALWAYS with tight supervision). We adore feeding time and all aspects of caring for her throughout the day, and we can't wait to start taking even better care of her now.

I'm here to learn and converse, and I'm looking forward to meeting you!

Welcome to you and Princess Rainbow I am also a first time dragon mama to my boy Marlow. Misinformation is everywhere unfortunately and most of us start off with at least one big mistake in lighting or heating as a result of that- good news is you caught on that very early on and can correct it before there is any effects

If you put up what lighting , heating and feeding staples you are thinking of getting to correct the current ones you have then you should get a lot of help here to make sure you get the best ones this time around

That's a great idea! Should I make a new topic for that in a different section of the forum?

Yep just start one in the ‘enclosures’ section

Will do. Thanks so much!