Note: Never Hug This Teddy Bear

On a recent beautiful sunny spring desert day, here's what happened. My granddaughter somehow was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a 5 inch piece of a teddy bear cactus "jumped" onto her leg.

And it didn't have anything to do with the fact that she was seen poking stuff with an old set of aluminum knitting needles just prior to the 'incident'...(Reeeaally Nana...I didn't poke the cactus with the knitting needles; I was minding my own business and it just jumped across the yard at me!)...But, I digress.

What came next was the really fun part of the incident. After minutes (which felt like hours) of screaming, parental and grandparental hand wringing over how the HECK to get this thing OFF, and then some more screaming, things got even more interesting real quick.

She panicked beyond reason, well, maybe with good reason, when she saw her grandfather coming at her with some scissors. He was intending to cut the thing off so more spikes wouldn't impale her while we were trying to get the spikes out that were already imbedded. Incidentally, these types of cactus spikes look innocuous enough but they actually have little barbs on them so go in really easy and then they hurt a hundred times more coming out.

Well, when the great panic happened, she threw her leg up into the air and most of the cactus flew off her leg and quick as a blink imbedded itself onto her Dad's armpit! And I somehow got a couple of offshoots into my finger. So, now we have three people with spikes in them.

But we were all stunned into submission and no one was crying or screaming or panicking anymore. All that was left was to extract the spikes from Dad's arm and granddaughter's leg and Nana's finger.

That part wasn't pretty and was accompanied by some more crying, which was well deserved and cathartic. After which, granddaughter said to me: "never hug a teddy bear...cactus". Words of wisdom to live by.