Never wear sandles in the Desert!!

Featured here are some images from a photo shoot in Scottsdale, AZ. What a beautiful weekend it was. My wife came down with me and we left the kids home. We got home last night and woke up to snow on the ground this morning. The first thing I noticed when we got there was that the desert area in Scottsdale is a gold mine for photographs. So I thought it would be a good idea to end our photo shoot among the cacti of Arizona. So we got out there and I had the family where I want them and I began to shoot. I began to back up and stepped my mesh shoes right into a "jumping cactus" called such because of it's ability to detach from the mother cactus. So I had a ball of cactus stuck in my foot and my friend Kelly came to help me get it out. Meanwhile I back up into another and get one stuck in my leg. Mind you these are like porcupine quills with barbs on the end. They are meant to stick and pulling them out means pulling out your flesh with it. Kelly yanks the cactus out when I wasn't expecting it and it hurt like a mother. I then began working on getting the cactus out of my foot when all of the sudden I look up and Kelly has got the previous ball stuck in his hand. So I began to help him get that out and then Kelly saw that I was about to step on the last one that came off the my leg and he picked it up and threw it without thinking and it went right into his sons foot. His feet were exposed because he was wearing sandles. He began to scream and kick and it got really stuck so we had to pick him up and hold him still. We had no idea how to get all of those barbs out of his foot because he had so many stuck deep (later I counted 15 holes in his foot). While I was thinking Kelly grabs the sandle and yanks as hard as he can and pulls the hole cactus out in one swoop. It was the equivalent of getting a tooth pulled when it is not even loose. I have never heard of a plant more appropriately named than the "jumping cactus". The image where Kelly is holding his son is right after this whole incident. In that moment Jackson said to Kelly, "Dad, why did you throw that at my foot?" We managed to get a few shots off anyway.