The Greenhouse has a Room for Spikies

I had to sign my teaching contract on campus yesterday (put off, yes, for over a month, entirely because, with two little girls, the five-second review and signing of a teaching contract takes approximately half the day), so, it being a fine day, we hoofed it up to campus, some of us splashing in mud and sliding up and down huge mounds of slushy snow piled precariously close to busy streets, skulked in and out of Ballantine as surreptitiously as possible (wanting to meet neither teacher nor student while currently deeply ensconced in role of mom), and then hit our hands-down favorite place on campus:

The IU greenhouse:

I hardly dare speak of my love for the IU greenhouse lest it become too commercial, and the next time the girls and I visit we find (gasp!) another person already there!

Because every time we go we have the whole place to ourselves, just us and the gardeners, and we stroll around admiring food crops, tropical plants, water plants, tall plants (See my scientific terminology? The greenhouse has already taught me so much!), and spiky plants.

At each door to the spiky plants, there's a big sign warning that spiky plants live inside. I warn the girls several times over, just as I do every visit, that there are plants inside this room that have prickles and spikes and thorns, and we mustn't touch anything.

So obviously the first thing Willow does upon entering the room is to lay her entire hand upon a small, prickly cactus, the kind that leaves the prickles embedded in your skin as a defensive maneuver. She looked like Old Yeller after the fight with the porcupine.

A hundred prickles, probably, on her already filthy hand.

Is it wrong to feel angry with your child when she hurts herself?

Mental note: next time, bring tweezers to the greenhouse.