DESERT Botanical Gardens: Prickly Experience

We've had the Desert Botanical Gardens on our To Do List for a while, and this morning we finally made it there. I was excited to see the butterfly exhibit they have this time of year and I hoped it would be a big hit with Jonah.

We got there around 9:30 in the morning and it was a gorgeous day. Here are some pictures from the wildflower trail...
Jonah's treasure of the day was his little wooden crane that Aunt Christel gave him. He dragged it along the dirt path, through the mud puddles, and scared away many a hummingbird with the racket.
One of the highlights of the morning was the Patrick Dougherty sculpture. Jonah called them "nests" and ran through the tunnels created by the interlinked sculptures for quite a while. We had to drag him away.
Another highlight was the ladybug he found in The Breathing Room section of the Wildflower Trail. We walked the trails for about an hour and a half, stopped to eat chicken sandwiches at the Patio Cafe, and we were finally on our way to the butterfly exhibit when this happened...
This particular cactus did not LOOK prickly. Jonah told us that it was "bumpy" and didn't complain of needles...until later. Five minutes after I took this picture he put down a rock that he'd been carrying for a while and told me he had a boo boo on his finger. He wouldn't let either of us look closely at it. I figured he had a splinter. A little while later he was drumming on a wooden stump and really started complaining. I sat him down in my lap and took a close look at his fingers. To my horror there were dozens of tiny, splinter-like needles stuck in every one of his fingers and all across the palm of his right hand.

Needless to say we didn't make it to the butterfly exhibit. We had to go straight home to the tweezers.
Notice how he won't lay his right hand on Michael's back? He held it like that all the way home (about a 45 minute drive). Thank the Lord he sat still and watched Backyardigans while Michael tweezed the needles out. He was quite the trooper.