Anyone who’s lived with a lizard, snake, or frog can tell you when it’s cold outside a reptile will adore you because you’re warm but when THEIR body temps go up they don’t want to be held, touched, or hardly looked at. They need to MOVE. Those critters have so much energy you’d think you were seeing a sneaky two year old, who’d just finished off a five pound bag of sugar, or John, a sixty-two year old, who, last week ate TWO large pieces of lemon meringue pie (instead of dinner) at three AM.  Then he attempted to go to bed, (and that boy didn’t sleep for the next two days, by the way.)
Cold blooded reptiles that get warm cannot sit still except in the presence of my father. He brought home three anoles when I was six. We kept three to seven in our terrarium until I reached my teens when we only had a one eyed toad. We’d found it as a (puppy?) and we knew it couldn’t see straight, and when you’re a toad and can only see out your left eye you strike at a fly and miss the first five times. That wasn’t going to hack itBin nature and you don’t have to have a fly as a pet to pretty much guess IT didn’t sit still for THAT!
My Father had Don and I catch flies, remove one wing, and my Toady chased his prey down, hit and miss, hit and miss until he caught the thing. Of course Toady had to be warm in order to expend all that energy (and perhaps he expending so much energy he didn’t have it to grow in size, because he never grew larger than a spool of thread even though he lived at our house twelve years.)
As a boy my father learned to combine his two activities. His mother told him she’d reward him with a little green lizard if he’d stop biting his nails. He promptly did. His lizard became his second favorite thing which he combined with his first; reading. He’d sit in a soft chair and place his lizard above his nice WARM pocket and the little fellow climbed in. The two of them would sit together for hours! I can still see my Dad now sitting under a warm reading lamp and Lizzy, (they all had the same name) sitting without moving, her nose stuck out from one side of Dad’s pocket and her tail out the other side. Both of them content and the only one to move was my Dad, occasionally tuning pages. The only way I can explain it is that my Dad must have been a cross between St Francis and Buddha.

From my Grandmother, to my Dad, and my brother Don and then his daughter Elizabeth, whose nick name you can probably guess, and her brothers, we love lizards. nancymauerman.com
Free Desktop Background from www.danoah.com