No peeing on the plants

I am very lucky to have little boys with very strong wills and minds of their own. They don’t seem to have a timid bone in their body and aren’t afraid to speak up for themselves.
I had to take our oldest, Daniel, to the emergency doctors on Friday night with very alarming symptoms that read straight off the meningitis warning posters – very high temperature, cold hands and feet, aversion to light and noise, drowsiness, sore joints etc – scary stuff.
When we got to the hospital the doc checked him over and concluded that it wasn’t meningitis but a really bad infection, somewhere. He couldn’t locate the cause of the problem so he poked and prodded and then asked Daniel if he could pee into a bottle so he could eliminate a kidney infection.
Daniel refused to take the order, citing ‘NO WAY, DISGUSTING!’ as his reason.
Now from the time we potty trained Daniel we drummed it into him that he must pee in the toilet and absolutely nowhere else but the toilet. God knows we had a time getting that message across. He would pee everywhere except the toilet – on the living room rug, into his wardrobe, over the base of the stand-up lamp in the living room. In fact if the doc wanted a quite recent sample from Daniel he provided one three years ago into the potted plant in his GP’s office reception area.
As that wouldn’t suffice Daniel was ordered to the hospital bathroom to provide a more up-to-date version. But he wouldn’t go. He was provided with kidney shaped dishes, nice blue cups and clear plastic funny shaped bottles with fancy stickers on the side of it but still no joy. I had created a monster, the child repeated my mantra ‘humans don’t pee anywhere except the toilet. T–O–I¬–L–E–T right?’
So there was a brief exchange between my five-year-old and the doc while I stood there wincing. In the end the inevitable happened – Daniel won the argument and went home without having to wee anywhere, not even into the potted plants at the door, although I did catch him eyeing them up on the way out.