GFOP

Yeah, totally. Obviously the news that you were getting laser hair removal because a grown up says you won't ever need that again would be quite a blow, and even if you were allowed to grow back up it would be a constant reminder. But you can just imagine one of the littles feeling just a little scratch as someone works a pair of tights past their ankles and knowing that at some point soon someone will decide that they've seen quite enough of that, and when they do all you'll be able to do is lie there on the changing table and let them take your maturity away again. And god forbid maybe your babysitter is in charge of that and forces you to call your monthly wax something ridiculous like "ouchy bye-byes" and threatens all sorts of punishments if you don't immediately run over and show and tell Mommy and/or Daddy all about it when they get home. THAT would be embarrassing!

Hmm - I haven't specifically thought about the specifics of it, but I imagine some of the "families" have come up with a permanent solution to that issue. Others might not have found a way to do that without calling too much attention to themselves, so may have to have more of a "routine maintenance" approach.

I'm always trying to write something...real life is busy these days and even "simple" ideas like this one turn into 16 pages of text, but I'm sure this won't be the last thing I write in this universe!

Hey all - close followers of @34qucker's might have noticed that he did a drawing of Jackie from Baby's Unexpected Trip (and other stories I've written a few months ago. Since then, the two of us have been working together on this piece, and we've had a lot of fun! He's done a full companion series to this story - the first image is embedded below, and the rest are over on his SubscribeStar, which I highly recommend! Hope people enjoy this as much as we did! _________ “Look who’s here, princess?” Mama asked, sliding a cake with a lone flickering candle onto the tray of Jackie’s highchair. There was really only a small handful of people it was likely to be, and given that her biological parents and the majority of the other regressed adults she was “friends” with had been in attendance at her birthday party the weekend before, it was no surprise to see Mama’s boyfriend, Dada, enter the kitchen. “Just in time to sing,” Mama continued, more to Dada than her. Though Mama’s tone suggested a coincidence, Jackie had little doubt that his recent arrival explained the 15 minutes or so she’d just spent stuck snugly strapped into her highchair between the end of her dinner and her impending dessert. Dada surveyed the scene briefly, seeming to slightly chuckle at the sight Jackie presented as he moved to join Mama at the kitchen table in front of Jackie’s chair. “Happy birthday to you!” they began slowly, with Mama in particular summoning an enthusiasm that could only be achieved with the tinge of mockery that was unmistakably present. “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, Baby Jackie! Happy birthday to you!” “Yay!” Mama exclaimed, clapping patronizingly as she stood up once again and crossed back to Jackie’s highchair. She placed a would-be supporting hand on Jackie’s back, pointing towards the cake with her other hand. “Do you think you can blow out the candle, baby Jackie? You’re the birthday girl, so you get to!” Mama, of course, knew she could, having just seen her do so at her birthday party. In fact, much of this scene mirrored what had happened the other day, right down to the polka-dotted birthday hat whose elastic had been just slightly pinching into her chin since she’d been woken from her nap this afternoon and the bib around her neck proudly declaring “Still 1” just in case anyone had any doubts that this year bore no greater prospects for Jackie being allowed to resume her adult life than any of last eight had. With no desire to draw things out, Jackie leaned forward, quickly exhaling to extinguish the flame in front of her. “Good job, sweetie!” Mama praised, with Dada joining her in applause even an actual toddler would realize well exceeded the feat it was rewarding. “I’ll bring this right back, birthday girl!” she continued, snatching the cake off the tray and moving towards the counter behind Jackie’s perch. “I just need to get things ready for everyone to have their cake!” Jackie was far more relieved than annoyed at that news. The cake was not that much smaller than the one she’d shared with her fellow big babies the other day, and there had been 7 of them that day. With nothing else to look at, Jackie was left sort of awkwardly looking at Dada as he remained looking at her. Though he’d been on the scene dating Mama for a few years now, Jackie really didn’t know much about him. If Mama needed a babysitter for Jackie, it was usually to allow her to do something with Dada, so fortunately she never left Jackie alone in his care. Beyond that, Jackie had the impression that their relationship was largely physical, as, at least while Jackie was not tucked away in her crib (which was often conveniently soon after he arrived, regardless of whether that made for an early bedtime or an unscheduled extra nap), she was almost more likely to hear the sounds of Mama and Dada getting a head start on adult activities as she was to hear them having a conversation that would give her any insight into his personality. Even if she wasn’t sent to bed, Jackie’s presence barely seemed to deter them, but she suspected that things only got more physical rather than more conversational once they were alone. When Jackie was around, Mama clearly drove all interactions between the three of them, so neither Jackie nor Dada really knew what to do in brief moments like these where they were on their own. Jackie didn’t really mind the respite, of course, especially where she figured to be the center of attention again in a couple of moments when she’d be served her cake. Cake was always a real double edged sword for her. Between her birthday, the birthday parties she went to for her friends, and birthday celebrations for Mama, Dada, or her real parents, she probably got a chance to have cake somewhere around 10 times a year. Considering she spent literally every other day of the year desperately wishing for anything other than the baby food her diet otherwise consisted of, the cake truly was a treat. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly a tool used by Mama and the other grown ups to serve up maximum humiliation. There were some variations on a theme, but she could be certain she’d never get silverware, and in most cases, even her hands would be stuck under the tray of a highchair like they were right now. And while clearly better than her normal diet, the cakes were always generous-to-a-fault with their frosting. The result was always a mess so great it made even some of the messiest faces Mama could generate with deliberately errant spoonfuls of baby food look positively dainty compared to the slovenly effect the frosting produced. And, of course, that mess was usually made in front of an attentive crowd of some sort that was more than willing to comment. Even after the mess was over, the impact of the cake was often long-lasting. Jackie’s body wasn’t used to the sugar, so she often had a stomach ache, especially since the addition of the large dessert was never offset by being fed any less during any of her regular meals. That specter loomed especially large today, as Jackie was already dealing with a fullness in her lower abdomen that was only going to lead to one outcome. One way of looking at her day-to-day existence was as a game of trying to get her body and whatever Mama’s agenda was to sync up so that she spent as little time in dirty diapers as possible, while ideally also minimizing how much of that time was in front of others or stuck in situations where she needed to put a lot of weight on her loaded backside. That wasn’t a game she could really win, of course, but so far today she’d been pretty successful at minimizing her losses. She’d had a very minor mess this morning (a concept the version of herself that had left college would have gagged at the thought of), and Mama had even changed her unusually quickly afterwards. She’d idly thought earlier this afternoon that the universe’s birthday present to her was going to be a mostly painless day on that front, and even right up until Dada had walked in she’d thought that if she could hold off until she was out of her highchair she’d pretty much guarantee that she’d have nothing worse than a few gratuitous seat pats from Mama to ostensibly confirm the state of her diaper or the gross but short lived smash as she was set down to be changed before a bath or bedtime just a few minutes after the end of the dinner ordeal. With Dada here now, the odds she’d be able to do it in relative privacy looked a lot worse, and Jackie was actively reckoning with whether his presence would cause enough deviation in the routine that she’d need to just suck it up and do the deed while she was still seated to make sure that she wasn’t whisked off to bed so quickly that she didn’t have time to do so after getting down but before being changed. Still, as long as she avoided that, the time element of the problem was clearly working in her favor, and she’d have to take that as a relative win. “Alright,” Mama playfully announced, jolting Jackie out of the brief trance she’d been in, “yours will be in there, mister.” Dada smiled broadly, stood up, and walked past Jackie’s highchair. She heard him and Mama exchange a kiss, and then he seemed to continue out of the room, which presumably meant Mama had sent him into the living room. That seemed quite odd, since Jackie assumed they’d have eaten at the table, especially given that they’d surely want to comment on the greedy-looking disgrace Jackie was about to make of herself. She supposed she never actually saw Mama eat all that much, since she could quite conveniently eat lunch and dinner during Jackie’s nap and after her bedtime, meaning it was possible that that was just where Mama was in the habit of eating, but even so, Jackie suddenly sensed something was amiss. And woe betide any member of her social circle when something was amiss. The tray pressing tightly against her arms and stomach prevented Jackie from turning around to see what might be going on, but even before Jackie fully had time to register her wish for a little more mobility, Mama had reached her tray with the cake. Jackie looked down at it, confused to see that it was still intact, looking exactly as it had when it left her tray but for the candle having been removed. It wasn’t completely unprecedented to have a different cake than the “grown-ups.” Just this weekend, her birthday party had been Strawberry Shortcake themed. For the baby guests, this meant they all wore cutesy, more-or-less matching dresses while Jackie wore what she could only assume was a Strawberry Shortcake Halloween costume, then ate thick slices of a pink-frosted but otherwise plain yellow cake. For their part, the caregivers dressed completely normally, but joined in on the theme by eating much more reasonable portions of a far better-looking strawberry shortcake. Still, given the comments Mama had made, the size of the cake now in front of her, and the couple of minutes it had taken Mama, Jackie had assumed there would be some portioning that had taken place. Confused, she glanced over at Mama. Instantly, her confusion doubled. She’d felt Mama moving in close, but at first her attention had focused on the cake in front of her. Now, she realized that perhaps the bigger surprise was that Mama was standing next to her completely in the nude, for some reason holding an intricately laced thong - clearly hers - in the hand that hadn’t proffered the cake. Jackie literally drank from Mama’s breasts daily, and also fairly frequently saw her in either a sports bra or bikinis, plus of course was in various states of undress in front of Mama herself multiple times a day, but somehow seeing her fully exposed breasts like this felt incredibly taboo. The tray in front of her slightly obstructed Jackie’s view of Mama’s lower half, but she could see just the very top of her pubic hair. Between that and the panties she was casually flaunting on her finger, Mama didn’t even need to say a word to make Jackie feel very self-conscious about her own hairless crotch as she slightly squished on the swollen padding below her with each shift in her chair. “We’re gonna have some grown-up cake in the other room,” Mama said, seemingly answering Jackie’s look of confusion. Jackie hadn’t heard that euphemism before, but the meaning was clear as day in this context. “But that’s nothing little birthday girls need to worry about. You’ve got all this yummy cake to eat! If you don’t finish before we do, I’ll just have to assume you’re all tuckered out from all this birthday fun and put you straight to bed and deal with the mess you’re about to make in the morning!” Jackie just slightly whimpered at that news. There was no way she could finish the entire cake in front of her, was there? And yet, she’d yet to see Mama fail to follow through on a threat like that in all the years she’d been under her care. Of course, the consequence of failure wasn’t exactly clear, either. Jackie’s mind had immediately jumped to the messy diaper she’d been scheming about timing optimally, but surely Mama couldn’t know about that, could she? It seemed more likely that she meant she would send her to bed with a frosting covered face. That had certainly never happened before, but Mama was creative and it did sound pretty awful. Perhaps she could sort of wipe some excess off on her pillowcase, but with her hands immobilized by her nightly swaddling, she would only be moving the frosting from her face to where she’d be putting her head down. Either way, it seemed like a recipe for waking up with a sticky, crusty disaster all over her face and hair. “Oh, and Baby,” Mama said, interrupting Jackie before her train of thought got too far out of the station, “I don’t know if you’re too little to tell, but I thought Dada looked very excited for his cake. So I would dig in if I were you.” Mama was condescending, but she was right. The best way to avoid finding out what an overnight frosting facial would do to her was to somehow slog her way through this assignment, and she would surely need all the time she could get. She took a deep breath, straightening herself against the highchair’s back almost like she was about to go underwater in a pool, then plunged face first into the sugary abyss, pulling up on the tray with her arms and hands to help get enough leverage to bend down to the cake despite the tray itself restricting her ability to lean forwards very far. Even with her face deep in the cake, Jackie couldn’t help hearing Mama chuckling with amusement before she left Jackie to it. The first mouthful, as she’d learned to expect over the years, was almost exclusively frosting, with the slightly grainy thickness of that layer meaning that she only bit the very edge of the actual cake. The sweetness was nice, but there was barely even time to register that. “You like it?” Jackie heard Mama ask teasingly as she sat up to try to swallow the mouthful of stiff frosting. “I bet you want every last bit.” Jackie looked down at the cake in front of her. The frosting was a good inch or so thick, and she’d probably managed a four or five inch gash in it, but it was demoralizing to see how little damage she’d done. She knew Mama was talking to Dada, but she still had to repress the urge to say “no” given how perfectly it fit Mama’s rhetorical wager with Dada. Even just looking at the cake, Jackie could tell that there was quite a bit on her face - you could actually see a print where her nose had hit the frosting, and Jackie could feel just a little caked on her nostrils, though not enough to seriously impact her breathing. Her chin and cheeks also held a decent share of the frosting she’d managed to take off the cake in the first pass. Jackie was a little more reckless with her second dive, knowing any cake that was stuck to her face or sufficiently separate and crumbled from the main cake on the tray beneath her would likely count as eaten for the purposes of this exercise. She was deliberate in pushing her face further down, doing her best to think of the frosting she felt hitting her eyebrows as a win, and even slightly shaking her mouth around in the cake, though she hadn’t yet bitten off enough of the actual sponge to really be making crumbs to send flying. Jackie soon settled into a bit of a rhythm. She’d already gone completely numb to the cake’s taste, which at once deprived her of the chance to enjoy how much this wasn’t the nasty mush she normally ate but also kept her mind off of the fact that this was clearly too much of a good thing. She’d also become so messy that she’d crossed an important mental barrier. If she had a mirror, she was pretty sure she could find plenty of spots on her face that weren’t actually covered in cake, but the mess felt so thorough that mentally it no longer seemed like there was any way she could get meaningfully dirtier. In a strange way, that helped, because it meant there was really no incentive for Jackie to be as aggressive as possible with each dive into the increasingly disheveled cake. “Yes! Keep going!” Mama moaned breathily in the other room, and for just a moment Jackie wondered if she’d paused without noticing. Listening for another second though, the murmurs of pleasure she was letting out seemed to indicate she was just particularly enjoying whatever it was Dada was doing in the next room. If Jackie hadn’t paused before, now she definitely had. Worryingly, Mama’s moans were clearly intensifying, though so far Dada at least wasn’t giving off any audible clues that he was approaching his own climax. Mama’s phrasing had suggested they were both intending to finish, but it certainly wouldn’t be completely out of character for her to prioritize her own pleasure without much thought about other’s, especially if that would somehow add to Jackie’s misery. So it was hard for Jackie to trust that his silence really bought her any extra time. She needed to get going. Unfortunately for Jackie, each time she folded herself down for another bite or straightened back up to chew and swallow was adding intensity to her need to make another kind of mess, and the rapid addition of much more food for her digestive system to process wasn’t helping matters at all. All this shifting back and forth on the highchair’s hard seat was sure to produce an extra gross diaper extra quickly if she messed herself now, but Jackie could tell that the carefully considered movements she was making in order to avoid accentuating her cramps were beginning to slow her down even more than the distracting noises behind her were. There was really only one thing to do now. As much as she’d hoped to be able to wait until she was at least done eating, realistically she was probably only adding a few minutes at most before she got changed, and while that would be very unpleasant it would beat spending the whole night covered in frosting. And so, reluctantly, the next time she sat up, she pushed. Regrettably, Jackie had more than enough experience with messing in tight seats like this to know that she’d encounter some resistance, and sure enough, she had to fight through some reverse pressure, forcing her soft log to immediately turn into an oozy pile that started to uniformly fill in space - mostly being forced up into the higher reaches of her butt crack but also going as far down as it could before the pressure of the chair created a barrier that couldn’t be passed. “Oh god,” Mama said from the other room. “It’s so big.” Though it was nowhere near an all-timer, it was true that Jackie could immediately tell this was not the minor mess she’d had this morning, and it packed a much more pungent punch than the previous parcel had. Still, it took her a few seconds to realize that Mama wasn’t talking about anything going on in her diaper, which they likely had no idea about just yet, and instead must have been referring to Dada’s member. If Jackie had been stuck in her highchair without the dual problem of her cake and her diaper to distract her, she would probably have begun to suspect that Mama, who’d certainly seen enough of Dada not to be surprised by his size, was making these comments to make sure Jackie knew what she was missing, and depending on how sexually frustrated she was or wasn’t feeling that day, she might have even found it slightly funny how cliche some of these supposedly spontaneous exclamations were. Another particularly loud moan from the other room reminded Jackie that there was no time to waste wallowing. Apparently, Jackie realized, the physical act of messing herself had brought her chewing to an unconscious stop, but she quickly resumed, swallowing as soon as she could. Looking at the cake in front of her, she couldn’t help but worry she was in trouble. The third of the cake nearest to her was pretty well destroyed, and she was starting to at least disturb the middle portion, but an entire crescent-shaped back portion still had the top layer of frosting sitting as smoothly as it had been when it was delivered, not to mention the three to four inches of untouched sponge underneath. Saying she was halfway through might be generous. Was it too pessimistic to think Mama and Dada sounded further along than that? With no alternative but to hope that some combination of a lack of firsthand experience and the desperation of her situation were making her more worried than she needed to be, Jackie forced herself to work on the only thing she could control by once again burying herself in the cake below her. Perhaps ironically, she realized that having her face unceremoniously stuffed in the oversized treat at least had the benefit of making it so she could no longer smell herself. Less pleasantly, shifting her weight off the directly upright point at which she’d just messed herself made it immediately clear that there was a little more still up there that would need to come out in a position like this. She really didn’t have the time, but the last thing she wanted to do was miss her chance now and then need to mess again as soon as she was tucked in for the night, potentially leaving her trying to sleep with a messy face and a messy diaper, so, keeping her face pressed deep in the cake, she pushed again, forcing the poop that was only just beginning to cool further from its original source and replacing it with a smaller mass of even fresher waste. Fortunately, Jackie could pretty quickly tell that she probably was done now, and so she attempted to gather just a little bit more into her mouth, then straightened up once more to chew and swallow, doing her best to ignore how her movement squeezed the mess just a bit further up her backside as she straightened out as if her crack was some sort of tube of toothpaste. Jackie could hear the volume of Dada’s deeper grunts growing rapidly, which was unsettling, since he’d been relatively quiet for much of the time they’d been going at it. “Faster,” Mama encouraged, and though this time it was quite clearly not directed at her, the encouragement was the closest anyone was going to come to being the Matilda to her Bruce Bogtrotter. Desperately, Jackie bobbed her head down to the cake below as rapidly as her ability to chew the sticky treat would allow, doing her best to make as much of a mess as humanly possible as she did so. Despite her efforts, though, there was undeniably still plenty of cake left when Dada’s grunt went over the top into a loud exhale of pure bliss, and, just a second or two later, Mama’s steady stream of ever escalating “oh!”s switched to two breathy shouts of “yes” and then culminated in her own guttural release of ecstasy. Even without having ever done more than some handsy making out herself, Jackie knew plenty enough to know she’d just heard them finish. With at least a quarter of the cake still undisturbed (and nearly that much scattered across the tray and her face), Jackie had clearly failed to meet the letter of the law when it came to Mama’s assignment. Jackie felt doomed. Still, she knew from the all-too-rare occasions that Mama allowed her to experience some release via self-stimulation that there was a natural desire to bask in the afterglow in times like these. While Mama universally found ways to jerk Jackie out of that bliss far before she was ready, Jackie suspected she’d be more than happy to afford herself that luxury. Maybe, just maybe, if she kept plugging away, Jackie could finish up before Mama and Dada untangled themselves and Mama made her way over to check on her progress. “Jeez,” Mama panted. “That filled me up so much I’m afraid if I move too quickly it’ll all just come right back out and end up everywhere.” “Same,” Jackie thought, though this time it was even more obvious than before that any resemblance to her own predicament was purely coincidental. Mama had the luxury of waiting a minute and then hoping that some careful movements could mitigate her problem, which, of course, sounded like a pretty high-class problem from where Jackie sat. Not only could she not indulge in a wait-it-out approach, she knew she had to actually make the problem worse in order to have any shot at some degree of meaningful relief later. Ignoring her fullness as best she could, Jackie resumed the dive, shake, rise, and swallow pattern she’d been diligently pursuing for most of the last ten minutes. The cake had long since stopped tasting like a treat, or really even tasting, and was just the sticky, crumby, slightly drooly thing she had in front of her that she had to try to finish. Without the sounds of far more adult activities floating in from the next room, Jackie was assaulted with the sounds of the cake’s cardboard disk shifting around just slightly each time she went in for a bite or the vinyl of her bib swishing side to side against the base of the tray. The sounds were clear to her from inches away, but she could only hope that they weren’t really audible in the next room, or at least if they were they wouldn’t doom her to failure even if she finished before Mama returned. But stopping wasn’t an option, as that would guarantee her failure. Soon, her focus on the cake was interrupted by the sounds of ominous giggling in the other room. “Alllllright, birthday girl,” Mama called, seeming to exaggerate the alright to simulate the groan you might make getting up from somewhere comfortable, “let’s see how you did!” Jackie did her best to swallow what was in her mouth, looking down herself as if maybe by some miracle perhaps that last bite had somehow been much bigger than she’d known. There was no pleasant surprise. What was in front of her was really no more than maybe an eighth of the cake (or, at least, the undisturbed part of what was in front of her was about an eighth - probably at least that much was strewn across the tray, not to mention Jackie’s face and bib), but it had clearly not been finished. Any reasonable person would see that she’d made an absolutely massive effort on the enormous task, but Mama had a long history of holding Jackie to unreasonable standards. “Oh, sweetie,” Mama said, putting her hand on Jackie’s shoulder as she emerged from the back of the highchair. She’d apparently found and replaced her bra on the way over, but was otherwise still naked. Mama sort of chuckled a bit, but didn’t say anything else for a second, leaving Jackie to wonder what she might be focusing on. God knows she’d given her more than enough ammo. Jackie tried her best to keep her face neutral, knowing that returning the condescension with a glare might worsen her fate, though with so much frosting caked on her it may not have been that obvious whether she’d held her poker face or not. “You were supposed to finish your cake, princess,” she continued at last, “but I guess there was just too much birthday excitement and you got too tired. Oh well, we’ll get you right to bed!” There had been too much of something, but it wasn’t exactly excitement. But leave it to Mama to frame things in a way that made it seem like Jackie was the real reason for her own problems. Blame, though, was hardly the biggest issue, and any hope Jackie had that her Mama might somehow consider her monumental effort worthy of cleaning her face anyways was dashed. “Oh!” Mama said suddenly, dashing away for a second before returning with her phone. “Your Mommy was the one who sent you that cake and I promised her a picture!” She fiddled with the screen with her hand for a second, pulling up the camera app and setting it to selfie mode. “Say, ‘thank you!’” she said when she was ready, leaning in with a massive smile to pose with her beleaguered charge. “Fank you,” Jackie mimicked weakly, not even intending the slight lisp that normally came from trying to speak around the presence of a pacifier in her mouth. On some sort of weird autopilot trained into her probably as far back as her original first birthday party, Jackie found herself forcing out a little half smile for the camera, though the face she saw mirrored on the screen in front of her certainly betrayed that she was less than happy. “Perfect!” Mama said after snapping the picture, holding it aloft a few extra seconds to allow Jackie to see. Mama had perfectly positioned herself semi-behind Jackie in such a way that you couldn’t really see anything on her naked bottom half, though a half-second’s examination would be plenty to see that she wasn’t wearing anything down there. Jackie couldn’t believe Mama was really going to send that to Jackie’s real mother, Mama’s own employer, but then her regression seemed to have a way of making people comfortable breaking just about every social norm imaginable. “Baby Jackie says thank you for the cake,” Mama faux-muttered as she walked back over towards the counter, clearly narrating the text she was sending to Jackie’s mother for the sole purpose of Jackie knowing what was being said about her. “Almost finished it all by herself! Even had time to make me a present - how nice of her! LOL!” Jackie heard the sound of the phone being set on the counter, more-or-less confirming that the evidence of her miserable birthday had been shared. Her parents, of course, had been the ones who made her like this in the first place and would have known full well what she might end up looking like when they sent that cake, but the thought of them seeing her like this still made her cheeks burn, especially since Mama had given away the shameful state of her backside, which otherwise would have stayed undetectable to an uninformed viewer. “Let me just get this out of the way,” Mama said, swooping in to take the cake off the tray. Still immobilized by the straps and the tray itself, Jackie could do little but stare at the clean circle where the cake’s cardboard disk had been, its outline memorialized amid the carnage she had caused all around it. The blank void really served to drive home just how monumental a mess she really had made. “Alright,” Mama said when she returned again. “I don’t care how tired you are, we can’t put you to be like this, can we? I don’t want to have to wash your sheets tomorrow.” Mama put down a package of baby wipes and removed one, quickly starting to scrape through the thick coating of crumbs and frosting that was smeared all over Jackie’s face. Instinctively, Jackie closed her eyes, knowing that Mama would need to get around and even over them given her state, and tried to hold still through the rather rough wiping process. Her mind was racing - she really hadn’t expected to be cleaned up like this, especially after the way Mama had confirmed she had failed. Perhaps she had decided she just didn’t want to do the laundry, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time she’d made a lot more work for herself just to further Jackie’s misery, so it would be a little surprising if this was a sudden change of heart. Which meant… Jackie couldn’t escape the conclusion that her first instinct was right. That somehow Mama had been able to tell she was about to mess herself and had set not sleeping in a poopy diaper, on her birthday no less, as the stakes of her basically impossible challenge. Jackie shuddered at the thought, cruelly reminded of the nasty pile beneath her by the slight change in position. “I know, the wipes are cold,” Mama said, with an unconvincing veneer of sympathy. “We’ll be done soon.” The wipes were a bit cold, but that was hardly Jackie’s focus. The scent of the wipes so close to her nose was overpowering the smell right now, but Jackie knew her nursery would probably smell for days after spending her whole night like this, and there was every chance she’d wake up at least somewhat itchy, though hopefully being relatively still through the night could minimize the severity of the rash she felt sure would come. Jackie felt Mama starting to wipe a little in her hair, which seemed like a sign that her face was likely done. She opened her eyes, noting that while most of her view was dominated by the underside of Mama’s forearm, she at least no longer could see any pink frosting in her peripheral vision. “This is still going to be a little sticky in the morning,” Mama said, perhaps having noticed Jackie had opened her eyes, “but at least it won’t make a mess. You’ll need a bath then, anyways.” Jackie knew that Mama was as much talking to herself as she was to Jackie, so no answer was expected of her. She just sat there, waiting for Mama to finally be satisfied. After tending to a few more spots in Jackie’s hair, she apparently decided that was good enough, and set the last wipe on the tray, before unlocking it, taking the tray to the trash to dump the used wipes, and then dropping the filthy tray into the sink for future washing. For her part, Jackie took the opportunity to stretch her arms and rotate her torso a little bit, pleased to finally have a bit more freedom of movement now that the tray that had limited her mobility for much of the last hour was no longer an obstacle. With the tray now gone, it would be possible to move her arms enough to reach the buttons at her sides and between her legs that held the strap around her legs and waist in place, but that would only cause trouble and Mama would be there to do that for her any second. As predicted, Mama returned right away, undoing the straps and just slightly pulling Jackie forward so that her knees now hung maybe six inches beyond the end of the seat. In a move both she and Jackie knew well, Mama slid her right arm into that gap, bent her knees, then powerfully boosted Jackie up off of the seat and onto her right hip. Instinctively, Jackie wrapped her arms around Mama’s neck and put her head over Mama’s shoulder, facing backwards, while also bringing her legs around Mama’s waist, both of which helped bring a sense of stability to the position for her and seemed to help Mama walk more naturally as well. She didn’t particularly relish being carried, but she was even less interested in falling, so once she’d been picked up she did what she could to prevent it. Once they were settled, Mama took off towards Jackie’s nursery. Her arm had naturally slid to the seat of Jackie’s diaper when Jackie wrapped her legs around her, which, combined with the wide angle of her legs, meant that the small bounce accompanying every step up the stairs smashed her mess a little further into previously unsullied areas of Jackie’s crotch. Quickly, they reached the nursery, and Mama seamlessly slid Jackie down to a standing position near the changing table. “Alright,” she said, deftly removing the party hat from Jackie’s head and setting it on the edge of the changing table. “Arms up please!” Jackie did as she was told, and Mama quickly circled around behind her, undid the zipper on her back, and pulled the short little dress she’d been wearing over her head, leaving Jackie naked except for her mittens, frilly ankle socks, and diaper. “Let’s see,” she mused quietly as she deposited the dress into the laundry hamper and went into Jackie’s closet to grab some pajamas. “Perfect.” Mama emerged holding a pink fleece footed sleeper, which would hardly have been Jackie’s first choice. Though the weather was getting a little cooler at night now, it was hardly enough to necessitate such warm pajamas, especially when she’d already be tightly wrapped in her blanket. Lighter layers didn’t help that much given the tight swaddle, but she’d still prefer them to the thick fleece that would only make getting comfortable that much trickier. Mama draped the sleeper over the side of the crib, then reached down to the bottom of the changing table and grabbed a diaper, unfurling it on the padded surface above. “Hop up!” she instructed Jackie. Jackie did so eagerly, not even caring about the awful squish that came when she enthusiastically plopped herself down on the top of the table. She’d been right all along - Mama really must have meant she wouldn’t be cleaning her face, but then got cold feet when she thought about the extra laundry. Thank god! Jackie laid back on the fresh diaper, knowing Mama liked to keep it there to help line up the next diaper to her body, and to catch any dribbles that unfortunately occasionally escaped during a change. Jackie always hated when that happened and she was denied even the few minutes she normally got in a completely dry diaper, but even if that happened it would be an incredible upgrade over what she’d expected just a minute ago. The powder or wipes container or something must have been empty, because Mama spent a little while longer than usual searching for something under the table when normally all the main supplies were right on hand on the table’s side. “Here we go,” Mama muttered, standing up before adding more loudly, “Hold still.” That was a slightly unusual admonition, but Jackie did so. Mama reached between her bent knees to undo the first tape, but instead of the telltale tearing sound, Jackie instead felt a slight pressure slightly lower, and then heard a puncturing sound. “Oh no!” she thought. With her head back she couldn’t quite see past her own breasts and the bulging thickness of the diaper, but she was suddenly sure Mama had told her to hold still because she was using a pair of scissors to slice little drainage slits into the shell of her diaper. She wasn’t getting a change at all - Mama was just preparing to double diaper her! “If I’d have known you’d be so worn out I would have added a booster so we could put you straight to bed,” she explained, confirming Jackie’s fears. “So we’ll just have to do two diapies instead!” Double diapers weren’t entirely unfamiliar, but Jackie was not subjected to them all that often. Her diapers were seemingly plenty thick and absorbent on their own, so Mama only resorted to doubling up maybe once a month. The reasons ranged from relatively defensible situations in which neither Mama nor Jackie would want to have to deal with a diaper change to more overtly cruel scenarios like this one. At least Jackie would likely not really need to go anywhere in this one - in her crib it wouldn’t really matter much that her legs were pushed even further apart, making even crawling more awkward. Since there was no cleanup or even powdering to be done, Mama was done adding the second diaper very quickly. Jackie was used to her snug diaperings, but she could have sworn Mama had pulled even tighter than usual, no doubt in an effort to further compound Jackie’s misery by wedging her poop even closer to her skin. Mama helped Jackie to a seated position on the table, then helped her slide off. Awkwardly, Jackie waddled over to the side of her crib, struggling with the thickness between her legs. Mama beat her there, grabbing the sleeper and unfurling it such that she could work it over Jackie’s feet and legs, and then pulled it up and guided Jackie’s mittened hands through the heavy sleeves. Finally, she pulled up the zipper, needing to pull the loose material towards herself in order to avoid getting stuck on the bulging mass of padding around Jackie’s waist. Mama turned around and grabbed a bottle off of the warmer that sat on the changing table, presumably having brought it up during the slightly extended period Jackie had spent stuck in her highchair between being fed dinner and subjected to her birthday cake. Holding Jackie’s hand, she slowly led her over to the large rocking chair in the corner. Sitting down, she helped Jackie lay down next to her and position her head on her lap. Though Mama’s thighs were pressed against each other, Jackie was still far more conscious of how close she was to Mama’s crotch than she would have been had Mama had even a skimpy pair of shorts on. Jackie’s nose had basically gone numb to the smell of her diaper, but now it was awoken by the lingering smells of the far more mature action that Mama had finished participating in just minutes ago. Fortunately, the bottle was brought to her lips without Mama doing anything to stretch out the moment. Jackie accepted it, happy enough to have something to wash away all of the lingering sweetness in her mouth even if it was baby formula. It certainly didn’t help with the tremendous fullness she was experiencing, but even water probably wouldn’t have been able to help much with that, and that was never an option anyways. It only took a few minutes for Jackie to slurp down her bottle, and when she’d finished, Mama pulled the bottle away and set it on the end table next to her. Jackie hoped that given Mama’s insistence that she needed to go to sleep so urgently that even a diaper change needed to wait, she might forgo the customary post-bottle burping, but unfortunately there was no such consistency. With the practice that came from years of doing this multiple times a day, Mama helped Jackie slide up and reposition herself onto Mama’s lap. While she was more kneeling than sitting, she’d been burped in dirty diapers more than enough times to know that the position gave Mama ample opportunity to employ either knee bounces or butt pats to further compound her messy misery. Sure enough, quite suddenly Mama’s right leg, conveniently the one Jackie was straddling, apparently became irrepressibly restless, bouncing high enough to inflict intermittent pressure on Jackie’s backside as she also patted Jackie’s back to bring out some burps. The bounces were pretty light, and the second diaper was thick enough to provide a bit of protection, but it was more than enough to make sure Jackie’s attention stayed squarely focused on her disgusting diapers. Even preoccupied, Jackie managed to generate a few burps quite quickly, and so while it felt longer to her, she was really only stuck on the receiving end of Mama’s bounces for about a minute. Once Mama was satisfied, she eased Jackie’s upper body off of her shoulder. Jackie knew this maneuver as well, and automatically pulled her right leg back and put her foot on the floor, leaving her left knee on the couch, which gave Mama the option to either carry her or otherwise direct her to either crawl or walk to their destination. This time, Mama stood and slid her hand into Jackie’s, wordlessly walking Jackie the couple steps to the crib. Arriving there, Jackie made sure to quickly climb up, knowing that if she dallied at all, Mama would help, and surely that would involve being forced to sit down on her full diaper one last time for the night. In a lot of ways it hardly mattered, since it would be hard to really make her backside meaningfully more messy, but years of learned self-preservation instincts told her to spare herself whenever possible, and so by quickly clamoring up she was able to have first contact with the firm mattress come from her hands and knees rather than her bottom. Jackie eased herself onto her side and then positioned herself on her back with her head on her pillow, centering herself on the blanket as Mama expected. “Good girl,” Mama said idly, taking the near side of the blanket and pulling it over Jackie’s body, tucking it under Jackie’s body at the shoulder, waist, and feet, effectively pinning it under Jackie. With practiced precision, she then grabbed the far side of the blanket and pulled it snugly over Jackie’s body using a little fold and tuck maneuver at the feet and an additional tuck at Jackie’s shoulder to effectively seal Jackie into a cocoon of warmth. Jackie could roll onto her side, but since Jackie’s arms started pinned tightly to her sides and her feet were held tightly together, she usually couldn’t really wriggle free even if the blankets were usually a bit looser in the morning than when she was out to bed. Mama turned quickly and opened a drawer under the surface of the changing table, pulled out a pacifier, and plopped it into Jackie’s mouth. In truth, Jackie was so used to having it in that sleeping without it might have proved kind of awkward. “Sleep tight, birthday girl,” Mama cooed, bending down and placing a patronizing smooch on Jackie’s forehead. “Hope you have sweet dreams about how good your birthday cake was! Or,” she said, dropping to a quieter, more conspiratorial tone, still with her face just inches from Jackie’s, “maybe you’ll dream about how much you wish you had mine.” She stood up, holding eye contact with a smug grin on her face as she pulled up the rail of the crib. “Night, night,” she said dismissively as she turned away, snapping off the light and closing the door behind her. Jackie took a deep breath, wishing she hadn’t as the smell that she’d gone slightly nose-blind to assaulted her anew. She knew that by the time she woke up she’d barely smell herself, but also that every time she entered her room for the next couple days she’d get a little reminder of her ordeal. She wiggled a little, trying her best to stretch into as comfortable a position as possible given how restrictively she was swaddled. She’d been a side sleeper before all this, but that wasn’t as comfortable with her hands both down at her sides, and so she tended to sleep on her back these days. Once she was reasonably satisfied with her position, she did her best to hold still. Jackie wasn’t completely unfamiliar with trying to sleep in messy diapers, but it almost always was because something unfortunate happened sometime between being put to bed and morning. Being put down for a nap already poopy was a punishment Mama did use every once in a blue moon, though, and it gave her enough experience to know that if you could just hold still long enough to let your sleep routine take over, you could kind of succeed at ignoring the stickiness and the smell and eventually drift off. Still, though, it was hard not to focus on it when it was so absurdly unfair. Being sent to bed for a whole night of stinky slumber happened less than annually. Mama threatened it sometimes, but even she seemed to think it was a little too cruel to actually punish Jackie with it. Not for the first time, though, now that it was actually happening it was for something completely ridiculous. Maybe the frosting had been the plan all along. Jackie knew that if she asked for cake tomorrow (or really any other day of the year), the best she could hope for would be to be turned down without even a moment’s consideration, and yet somehow today her failure to eat enough cake for a small party was enough to merit a punishment this extreme? The whole thing felt like it was a set-up to remind Jackie that Mama could do whatever she wanted, even if Jackie still couldn’t really work out how Mama would have been able to tell she was about to poop herself. She hoped the frosting hadn’t been the plan all along, and the dirty diaper had just been a cruel little added bonus that Mama decided to use to her advantage - she’d hate to find out she’d been the architect of her own demise like that. Trying not to think about that problem, Jackie’s tiring mind drifted instead to Mama’s taunt on her way out of the room. Of course, if she had to choose between the two, Jackie would have preferred Mama’s evening to the one she was being subjected to, but Mama had driven her expectations so low that even just to have been allowed a normal sized piece of a cake (maybe with a fork, if she was getting really greedy) and a timely diaper change could have passed as an above average day. In typical Mama fashion, though, she’d found a way to make a day that should have celebrated her increasing maturity a particularly poignant example of how much of that she’d lost, all while also finding a way to viscerally illustrate to Jackie exactly what adult pleasures she was missing while she was stuck in a seemingly endless loop of being one again. She’d probably never even be able to look at cake as a welcome reprieve from her usual diet ever again, since at best she’d be reminded of this disaster and at worst she’d have to worry it might be repeated. As Mama’s taunting had made clear, it had definitely been a happier birthday for her than it had been for Jackie. Again.

Well, absolutely. Shelly has definitely betrayed her family (though, also her own interests) by petulantly undermining the business. But to the extent any of these work in the morality tale vein, it's only in relationship to the big babies' actions that lead to their regression. To the extent I really pursued the idea, the thought was just that it was a fun way to (somewhat) vary up the other characters' backstories. Of course, you could certainly call the punishment it's own kind of betrayal (Shelly would!), but none of the girls' punishments are remotely proportional to the respective crimes, so that wasn't my thinking in assigning the virtues.

I think you have enough to start writing here, because you have a basic grasp of who your characters are, what their motivations are, and a beginning, middle, and end. A couple challenges particular to your concept that I would be thinking about if I were writing it: Whose perspective are you going to write from? If you stay limited to one of your characters, how does that impact what your audience ends up knowing about the other main character's motivations? Your audience doesn't need to know everything you know about your characters, but, for instance, if you stay in Sophia's perspective, then there probably needs to be a lot of her trying to feel out what Catherine's real motivations are. If you switch between the two, make sure you do it in a way that is clear, properly paced (no switching every three paragraphs or something), and make sure that you keep straight what they already know and what the audience knows. For instance, if in chapter 1 Sophia thinks something to herself, that doesn't automatically mean that Catherine knows that in chapter 2, even if the audience does know Sophia's thinking. This could actually be a really interesting plot point/device in this story if you do it right - we could watch their perspectives of each other evolve as they get to know each other. Both of your characters have complicated motivations. That's good - it means they're real! It's just a tight needle to thread. Make sure, for instance, we get insight into why, if Catherine imagines a better society, she still works at an adoption agency. Is it different than others in a way that feels like a fair compromise? Is it just that the whole economy is based around exploitation of littles and she's gotta make a living somehow? And why does the conscientious objector still want to adopt? Same with Sophia - she writes about a better world, but she's also open to this arrangement. What drives that? Does she start that way or does the opportunity seem more palatable as she meets Catherine? These are totally surmountable questions that you may already have answers too and I dare say shouldn't have included in an outline of this length - just food for thought. Finally, what's your pacing? This sounds to me like a long-ish process to go from not knowing each other to some sort of accommodation at the end, so if I were you I'd really outline the scenes you are going to show us to make the story go from A to B. If you try to write every moment of 6 months you'll drive yourself crazy and you'll probably never finish. If you have your path, you can figure out how realistic it is to write each component, and have a real plan for finishing. Also, if you haven't read "Compromise" by Princess Pottypants (an ongoing story on Patreon right now), it might be worth it as you think about this project. In some ways it is very different from this and also shares some themes and is done smartly (like everything else PPP does). You don't want to write the same story, but I do think it might be a helpful way to think about developing your characters and the pacing of a story like this. Good luck - you've got something interesting here, so I hope you'll flesh it out and share something good with us!

Yeah, I originally wrote her as wrath, but I really didn't like the way it turned out, and by the time I did the re-write I'd basically abandoned the concept, so I wouldn't really say it's all the way there anymore. Maybe a better fit for betrayal in the circles of hell if I had been smart enough to make that connection.

And we're back! This took way longer than I would have thought to get to a place that I was happy with, but here is the last installment in the series (for now). Increasingly, I think I'll pop onto here with some random little short explorations/variations of a theme at some point in the future, but I bet I won't do a full round of all 9 babies the same way that I did for this topic and updates will probably be random and out-of-left-field since I have another project that I want to get to and share next. Hope people enjoy this! ----- Who’s a smelly girl? It’s Shelly! “Wow, you really pooped your pants! I can’t believe it!” Dirty diapers are about the most embarrassing thing our babies can do. And that makes the first couple of times they have to do it in front of anyone new all the more embarrassing. But, I guess, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and you can only hold it for so long no matter who might be around to witness the spectacle. For this final installment of our series on our babies’ first messy diapers, I was going to interview Baby Shelly and I’s mother, since she was the one who was there for Shelly’s first actual stinky diaper. But, I know that story, and it’s a little less exciting than you might think since it happened while Shelly was in her crib for an early bedtime, so Mom only saw it on a baby monitor. So, since I am the one who writes these, I figured I’d take the liberty of telling you about the first time that she made a messy little present for her favorite big sister to change. What was going on the first time you saw Baby Shelly make a stinky diaper? It was my third time babysitting Shelly after her regression. I’m seven years older than her, so I babysat her sometimes when I was like 13 or 14, but obviously this was a lot different than that was! Shelly had become quite a problem for our entire family, and I have to say that, especially then, I was pretty happy to have a chance to be babysitting and maybe extract a little bit of enjoyment from her punishment after all the trouble that she’d caused us over the last year or so. In a lot of ways, I was lucky, because I’d had to deal with it less than my parents or my sister. My grandfather started a commercial real estate company a few years before he had my dad, and eventually he, my dad, and my mom built it into a pretty big regional player in the market. When grandpa retired, he was adamant about making sure that the business helped keep the family together rather than tearing us apart, which they can do sometimes. So he came up with a pretty novel scheme that placed both of my parents on the board of directors and guaranteed me and each of my sisters a spot on the board as soon as we graduated college. There were a few other tricks to it, which basically required that we all be present for each meeting in order to make some recurring decisions that needed to be made by the board. The whole system could be a little bit clunky, but to grandpa’s credit, it pretty much worked. Both me and our middle sister, Gina, took jobs within the company as well as our seats on the board when we graduated and we were able to do well. After about five years, I actually left the job to start my own communications firm, but I still do about half of my consulting for the company as part of that, and of course I’m on the board, so it’s not like I’ve really gone far. And Gina has been slowly rising through the company, not even needing to rely on nepotism for her promotions. But then came Shelly. After she graduated, she wanted to start in the HR department. She’d always had a major gossip streak, and, in hindsight, that side of her probably picked HR just because she desperately wanted to be in the know. I feel like we would have been better off if we had said no and put her somewhere like the social media team, but we never anticipated that it would be nearly as big of a deal as it became. But Shelly was an immediate disaster. She did basically her work, but apparently all of the sudden the number of rumors flying around the company was ridiculous. It didn’t take that long for people to realize that she was the source, and Mom and Dad told her that she needed to exercise some discretion. She said she would, but it didn’t really even slow down for a second. For a while, that just put everyone in a really awkward position. In some ways, maybe we’d all just been lucky before that Gina and I had both come in and had a lot of success at the company and gotten along with people well even though you could imagine things being awkward because our parents were in charge. And if anyone secretly thought we were just the beneficiaries of nepotism, then Shelly was absolutely hammering home their point. She definitely would have been fired after a few months if she had been anyone else. But since she was family she probably got more chances than anyone else would have. And, of course, that came back to bite us all in the ass. There was a situation where one employee had filed a grievance against their manager for inappropriate conduct. It was fairly serious, and required a careful investigation to determine what had happened and what needed to be done next. Shelly wasn’t nearly senior enough to know the whole story, but she knew enough to know more than most people, and so of course that meant that soon the whole company knew the gist of the complaint. That was really bad, because it meant that the manager basically had to quit before the investigation was over because of the damage to his reputation. Apparently, the way the investigation was going, he probably would have been fired, but instead since Shelly had broken procedure, he could have sued and the company had to pay him a pretty serious severance in order to prevent that. And in the meantime, the employee felt like we’d basically given the guy a sweet deal when that was really only because of Shelly, and so we lost her too. That was the last straw. It wasn’t really needed, but the head of HR did a little investigation and confirmed that it really was Shelly who had been the source of the rumors. So, that was it. Mom and dad had to tell her she couldn’t work there any more. She, of course, complained constantly that they were being unfair, but I think they’d been more than fair to her. They even let her move back in with them during the period where she was looking for a job. Of course, getting fired from the family business is a pretty lousy piece to have on your resume, so she wasn’t exactly getting a lot of job offers. The whole time she was texting me and Gina trying to convince us they were being unfair, but we weren’t really all that sympathetic, since if anything they probably should have fired her sooner. All of that happened about a month before our next board meeting. When it came around, Shelly came as she had been since her graduation, and it was a little bit…uncomfortable. We talked about some of the big targets that we had and what we planned to bid for them over the next quarter, and then formally approved a couple of resolutions relating to those bids so that we could go to the bank for funding. Shelly sulked and moaned her way through the meeting, which was annoying, but we were getting good at ignoring her complaints, and at least she wasn’t too disruptive to the actual business. After that, though, we had the worst quarter we’d ever had since I was part of the company. Our biggest competitor made moves to buy all of the properties that we were trying to buy, and kept putting us in really difficult positions. We bought one building for way more than we wanted to, but for everything else, we missed out. They also kept slightly undercutting us on the rents they were charging, so we were just getting crushed from all sides. At first, we were just annoyed, but as the quarter went on, it seemed like more than just a coincidence. We had a couple of other competitors in the market, and they weren’t beating us out. It was always the same firm, which you wouldn’t really expect. It was like they had someone on the inside. We had a group chat with everyone except for Michelle, and all of us on it were pretty much baffled, since most of our staff wouldn’t know all of the things that it felt like the other firm knew. Apparently any time it came up at Mom and Dad’s, Shelly would get really weird about it and sort of bail out of the conversation and the room as fast as possible. Mom mentioned that it seemed like more than a coincidence, so I popped onto LinkedIn and looked Shelly up. Sure enough, Shelly was connected with someone who worked at the rival, who looked like she had been a college classmate. Maybe most interestingly, she’d also just been promoted up a couple of levels. I sent that to the group chat, and we all thought that seemed really suspicious. We didn’t confront her about it, but a few days later mom had a chance to look at Shelly’s phone when she left the house for a run, and as she scrolled through her texts she saw that she’d been in touch with the former classmate right around the time of our last board meeting, and that they’d planned to get dinner. That didn’t prove a thing, but they had only really texted superficially before that, so we were all pretty much sure at that point. We just needed to figure out how to prove it. Dad ended up coming up with a great plan. Mom and Dad “publicly” (on the whole family group chat) told the three of us that they suspected a leak. All of us said we knew nothing about it, but Shelly acted like she was offended that we would even suggest it. It was a pretty see-through case of she doth protest too much, but we kind of left it there, except that Mom and Dad told everyone that if it was any of us, there would be serious consequences. The other part of the plan was that Mom and Dad went out and poached Shelly’s friend from our rivals by giving her a huge signing bonus. It was actually a genius idea on his part, because he figured that either she was a wunderkid and we’d be really happy she was on our side of the competition, or she wasn’t quite that special but she had great instincts on how to use information to get ahead. Plus, of course, it meant that their source was gone. But naturally the first thing Mom and Dad did once they hired her was ask Britt if she had had any inside information. She said that she had heard some things from Shelly that she’d shared with her old bosses, and she actually apologized. That was totally unnecessary, and they told her that we’d want our employees to do the same, but they did ask her not to mention to Shelly that she’d joined our team. It turned out that that wasn’t a huge problem because she and Shelly really hadn’t been in touch all that regularly since they’d gone to dinner, but she agreed to let us know if she heard anything else from Shelly. We were all furious, but not really surprised. Since getting rid of her was basically impossible, we decided to give Shelly one more chance, since maybe her actions were really just sort of an immediate reaction to losing her job in the company, but I have to say that all of her complaints about how Mom and Dad had ruined her life were really hard to take over the next few weeks. When we had our next board meeting, it was unbelievably tense. The company’s performance in the previous quarter had us all a little edgy, but the tension was compounded now that the four of us knew what had actually happened the previous quarter. Still, we really needed to talk through a bunch of things so we were ultimately able to get through all of our business and set our targets for the next few months. And wouldn’t you know it, the next day Britt got a text from Shelly saying how fun dinner was and suggesting that they do it again. Britt told us immediately, and we asked her to go. It was possible that Shelly wasn’t going to blab again, especially since she’d seen the results from last quarter, but that didn’t seem likely. We knew that if she did, we’d have to act, since even if telling Britt was no longer really an issue, it was starting to look like Shelly was deliberately trying to hurt us and there was no telling who she might talk to next. So in the few days before the dinner, we had to come up with a plan for what we would do if Shelly was indeed betraying the family and the company. The obvious thing to do would have been to kick her out entirely, but the rules that my grandfather had set as a condition for passing on the company meant that we couldn’t really do that. So we had to find a way to kind of keep control of her while also sidelining her completely. Our group thread was kind of a mess, since we were simultaneously just pissed off and also trying to figure out what we could do to deal with Shelly. Mom always says ‘Stella came up with the solution,’ but really I was just complaining when I said that she always acted like such a baby when she didn’t get her way. I didn’t think much of it, but I guess that put the train in motion for Mom. Apparently over the next few days, while we were waiting to know for sure what would happen at the dinner, Mom started looking into how feasible it would be to just turn Shelly into a baby again. She says she didn’t tell us because she wasn’t sure if it was possible and she figured someone would eventually come up with something better, so in the meantime the rest of us were just flailing around from one terrible idea to another while she was cooking up the perfect way to make sure that we knew exactly where Shelly was and what she was doing at all times. So, they had dinner Thursday night, and Friday morning Britt came in to talk to mom and dad and confirmed what we’d all expected: Shelly had told her even more about our plans for the quarter than she had last time. And so that was kind of that. They thanked Britt, and then called Gina and I and told us the bad news. We all talked on the phone for like 20 minutes, since obviously we needed to do something about this now. Apparently Mom was still a little nervous about us thinking the idea would be crazy, so she let us brainstorm for a few more minutes. But I guess eventually she decided that we weren’t going to come up with anything better, so she told us about how my random comment had sent her down a rabbit hole that actually had a good chance of working if we were committed enough to it. We could get around the board meeting thing easily enough, since the rules only said that she had to be there, not that she had to vote or that she had to agree to anything. So we could just take her and then take her right back to her nursery. I actually burst out laughing! I hadn’t thought about what I’d said for a single second between when I said it and when Mom mentioned it again, but the idea of Shelly in baby clothes and playing with dolls in the corner at the board meeting was hilarious, and also pretty appealing. Mom isn’t really someone to joke around about things related to work, and you could tell she was serious, but I know I still had a million questions, and so did everyone else. The biggest, of course, was whether it was actually possible. She told Gina and I to come by their office at the end of the day and she’d show us all what she was thinking. So that’s when we knew that this wasn’t an idle suggestion. And sure enough, when we got there she had one of her trademark powerpoint presentations ready for us all. I’ve never found out if she already had that ready or if she spent her day that day putting it together instead of work. She started off by reiterating why it was a good idea, pointing out that she’d always be supervised, and wouldn’t have a cell phone to broadcast anything she might hear at a board meeting either. That part was easy enough to understand, but I think we all wanted to know more about the how, and that is where she went next. First she showed us a little taste of the surprisingly endless selection of diapers out there. Believe it or not, I hadn’t even thought about the diapers part yet, so if anything that made the whole thing even funnier. And even after seeing the amount of diapers out there, I was still shocked about the variety of clothing available too. She’d even thought about which furniture could be acquired and which needed to be custom. So, physically, it was possible. But of course, even then those weren’t the only questions she needed to address. The next place that she went was to childcare. She pointed out that she already was starting to work from home more, and that most of the time she’d easily be able to do that four days a week for now without it really changing what she did. And, she said, if that slightly decreased her productivity, it still beat what had happened last quarter. Eventually, she reasoned, we could find a babysitter we could trust for a day or two a week, but in the meantime if there was something that meant she had to be in the office, she could work out to have me or Gina come over to the house that day and work from there. The last thing was how the heck she was going to get Shelly to do all this. She’d thought that through too, but this was the part that seemed a little dicey to me, because she’d only get one chance and I couldn’t imagine Shelly would be cooperative. Her thought was that she’d confront Shelly that night, ground her to the house, and then take away her phone. She knew that would mean that she’d just spend the whole day upstairs in her room, and so she could use that to her advantage and have a contractor that she trusted from some of the renovations and repairs that we needed when we bought buildings come in to help convert dad’s office, which was (conveniently for babysitting purposes) next to hers on the first floor, into the nursery. She figured that she could be ready in about a week, and that she’d enlist either Gina or I to help get her dressed the first time. She had found some onesies that went straight into tight, fingerless mittens, and she figured that if she used those for the first little while then she’d be able to stop any serious fighting as soon as she got her dressed the first time. That seemed a little optimistic to me, but it was at least possible. So we decided that all four of us would go to Mom and Dad’s house that night and confront Shelly with the fact that we knew she was the leak, and that Britt was working for us now. That kind of made sure she knew we were all united, which hopefully would prevent any attempts to appeal to one of us for some sort of leniency. We figured that if she thought any of us might help her, she might be more resistant than if she realized how unified we were. She was stunned when we confronted her, and started fuming about how Britt set her up, before turning her ire to us for our role in it. We just weren’t having it, and eventually we just took her phone and told her she was grounded to the house. She started up with all this crap about how she had a right to her phone, and, ironically, about how she wasn’t some little kid who could be grounded, but she was getting used to us just kind of ignoring her complaints, and eventually she just kind of went up to her room to sulk, and apparently she basically just stayed up there for the next week or so watching TV. That was perfect, because starting that night Mom and Dad started ordering everything under the sun for the new life that she didn’t know was coming for her. The next day, they reached out to the contractor and got him to help us with some custom pieces needed to convert Gina’s old room into a nursery. Since most of his jobs were for the company anyways, they could have him prioritize the renovations without too much trouble. Once the room was ready, they had enough of the other stuff that they’d ordered to get started, even though there were still tons of diapers, clothes, accessories, and toys on the way. I was on a work trip for one of my other clients when the day came, so I couldn’t actually be there, but Mom, Dad, and Gina were able to work together to get her started. Apparently, three against one, it actually wasn’t all that hard to get her down to the nursery and dressed first thing in the morning. But the fits were endless, apparently, and based on the texts Gina was sending me it sounds like all hell would have broken loose if it wasn’t for those mittens. Within an hour, mom had had enough. All of Shelly’s complaining over the last few months was working against her now, because Mom just had no patience for it anymore. Mom declared that any time Shelly used any “big-girl words” (which just meant “words” in practice), she’d earn herself a one-way ticket to her crib for the night, no matter whether it was 10 minutes before bedtime or 10 in the morning. At first, I don’t know if Shelly really realized that just being left alone in the crib would be such a bad thing. Her answer to Mom’s new rule was to say “sounds good, goodnight.” Since it was only about lunchtime and she hadn’t eaten anything yet (they’d let her sleep in, and her arguing had put off any breakfast so far), Mom knew she needed to feed her first, so Baby Shelly got a stop-over in her new highchair, where Mom and Dad apparently had to work together for quite a while to get her to eat enough, since she kept refusing to open her mouth for the baby food or spitting it out when she did get some in there. Near the end, Gina sent me the most amazing Snapchat, which was the first time I saw the baby version of Shelly. All of her resistance just meant that she was absolutely covered in baby food, and with the bib, the onesie, the hairbows, and the tears on her face, she really just looked like a messy, fussy baby. Once they finally had her fed they cleaned her up and followed through by putting her to bed. I gather that there was a ton of squirming and muffled whines behind her strapped-in pacifier that could be seen and heard on the baby monitor, but nothing got her out for the next 19 hours. Of course, not long into that time she had her first wet diaper, and probably just as she was realizing that she wasn’t going to get any help with that, the fact that she has always been someone who poops two or three times a day caught up with her, and at about 5 o’clock seems to be when she had her first messy diaper. So, you know, after spending about 14 hours stuck like that, by the next morning I think Shelly realized why just saying “screw it” and talking so that she could go into her crib and not have to deal with Mom or Dad or her baby life wasn’t a winning long-term strategy. But, of course, her inability to keep her mouth shut when she should have had cost her her job and eventually her adulthood, and it didn’t prove much easier for her when what was on the line was a chance at a change or any freedom of movement for the rest of the day, so she wound up in bed before 3:00 most days in the first few weeks. After about three weeks, Mom slightly relaxed that by allowing her to talk to her dollies as long as she wasn’t transparently pretending to talk to them but really trying to say something to whoever was watching her (now that she has some other big baby friends, she can talk to them, too), and that actually did seem to help her quite a bit! I guess she just needed to be able to gossip and complain to someone or something. And even if they didn’t respond back, that was enough for her to be able to behave a little. So, besides for the Snapchat from Gina and a couple of pictures from Mom, the first time I got to meet my new baby sister was that Saturday. Except that it turned out to be a short visit, because as soon as I walked in at about 10:30, she groaned out “oh, no, please get out of here!” and so the whole visit just consisted of loading her up in the high chair, feeding her, and then tucking her in. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it kind of enjoyable after the months of crap that she’d put us through. I went over a couple more times during those few weeks where the no talking rule was being most strictly applied, but each time she was already in her crib by the time I got there in the afternoon, so I really only saw her over the baby monitor, which barely counted. Except for the fact that she didn’t know when I was coming, I’d have said she was avoiding me! Eventually, there were a couple of times where Mom and Dad just wanted to go out to eat, so I got to take her for the last part of the night. That was pretty fun, since I was able to feed her solo for the first few times, and then change her and put her to bed. But I still hadn’t seen any poopy diapers. But then came that third time I babysat her. What do you remember about the first time Baby Shelly messed? This time, it was going to be a much more extended engagement. Mom and Dad were looking to get away for a long weekend, and so Gina and I were going to be watching her for far longer than I had before. They left Friday morning, and it was shaping up to be a lighter day for me than for Gina, so I was happy enough to be the one working from Mom and Dad’s and watching Shelly from home that day, and Gina would come over the next morning to join me. To be honest, I was really looking forward to the extended time in charge. For whatever reason, I still wasn’t over all of Shelly’s moaning and complaining over the last few months, and when you combined it with her undermining the company, I was really looking forward to the chance to really baby her and tease her as a bit of revenge for all of the crap she’d put us all through. When I got there, Mom had already fed her breakfast, and she was dressed in a romper dress with some tights underneath, playing in her play area when I took over. Since her behavior had been decent except for the continued problems with talking, Mom and Dad had started to allow her out of the mittens during the daytime, so she could more easily hold onto her dolls and toys. My arrival briefly stopped whatever conversation she’d been having with her dolls, since I guess she was embarrassed for me to see her talking with her toys. For a while, she tried to find something interesting to do with some soft blocks, but that didn’t really keep her too entertained. She also banged a little on her xylophone, but that only had five keys that made less than pleasant noises, so she stopped pretty soon after she started. Eventually, she took a few dolls over to her doll house, where at first she at first played silently, but slowly started talking to them more and more audibly, even if the words were a little bit hard to hear behind her pacifier. Honestly, it was so funny (and kind of cute!) to see her playing so much with her dolls that I was barely getting any of my work done and mostly just sending Gina snaps of the action, so eventually I decided that I’d rather just pay attention to her for a little while and got up to get her a bottle. When I came back, I interrupted her and opened up one of the gates on the sectional plastic dividers that, combined with the wall, marked out the area where she was to remain while she was playing. Opening the gate was really quite unnecessary since she could easily climb over them, but it helped reinforce that she needed one of the grown-ups to let her out. She came over to me, and I brought her back to the chair I was working at, where I had her sit on my knee, enjoying how obviously you could feel the thick padding of her diaper through her clothes. Her head was actually a little higher than mine now that she had the extra few inches above the chair, but I pulled it in onto my shoulder, with my left hand behind her back to brace her in that position, and then gave her the bottle. She was used to this by now, and she didn’t put up any fight before she started to drink it. For me, though, this was still quite novel, especially since most of my limited number of times feeding her so far had been while she was in trouble and I was getting her ready for bed, so they’d just been in the highchair. When she finished, I took the opportunity to take a finger and slip it inside the leg cuff of her diaper to check her. She was still dry, though. Mom said that she’d slowly been starting to move away from just having a few giant wetting incidents a day to a somewhat more frequent number of wettings throughout the day, but, at least in my presence, she still seemed reluctant to let go when she didn’t absolutely need to. I goaded her a little by praising her for still being dry and telling her how Mommy said she’d been wet and poopy a lot lately and then by calling her a cute little baby and all sorts of other things, mixed in with tons of patronizing kisses and coos. She couldn’t respond, and to her credit, she didn’t, despite plenty of squirming and an absolutely furious blush. Eventually, I decided that I had to get back to work and released her to return to her dolls, which honestly she seemed only too happy to do. I was surprised, then, when just 15 minutes later she calmly turned away from her dolls and just said, “OK, I guess I’ve had enough. Might as well get me ready for bed.” Of course, I knew something must be up at that point. She knew exactly what she was doing, and had, without any fuss or buildup at all, decided that she just wanted out of the current situation, even if it meant spending the rest of the day trapped in the crib. I kind of wanted to find out what the heck was driving that decision, but the rules were very clear that now I needed to get her ready for bed, even if she was obviously manipulating those rules. “Well,” I said, probably sounding genuinely disappointed, “I guess I don’t need to tell you what happens to naughty girls who try to talk like grownups. Let’s get you some lunch, and then it’ll be bedtime for you.” I helped her back up and out of the play area, then guided her out to the kitchen and got her situated in the highchair. I wasn’t really ready to give her lunch just yet, and now I also had to make sure I gave her enough to account for the dinner she wouldn’t be getting. That seemed like it might take a little while, so I decided that I’d heat up a bottle for her first, and then I brought it over to her and instructed her to drink that while I scoured the cabinets for what to feed her. I decided that, if she was going to rob me of a full day of fun with her, then I’d make a little fun of my own here, so what I did was that I grabbed like 8 jars, with an emphasis on the ones that seemed particularly unpleasant. I lined them all up and took another snap for Gina, then put them all in a single bowl, and sent a picture of that to Gina too. After that, I went over to the microwave to heat it up, then checked on Shelly, who seemed to be really speeding through that bottle, but wasn’t quite there yet, so I went back over to the counter, where I saw Gina had responded to my Snapchats. “Did she just suddenly say she wanted to go to bed?” she’d texted. “Yeah,” I wrote back. And then, “Do you know what’s up with that?” The microwave beeped, so I went over and opened it up, mixed everything around, and then put it back in for another 30 seconds. It smelled nasty, and looked even worse. My phone lit up again. “No,” Gina said. “But she did it when I babysat when Mom needed to go into the office a couple weeks ago.” “Weird,” I answered, even as the little bitmoji told me that she was typing another message. The microwave went off, but I waited for Gina’s response to come through. “Try slowing her down a little. She’s gotta have a reason, and we should figure it out.” “Good call! I’ll let you know!” I said, then I went back to the fridge and grabbed another bottle. I took the fiercely steaming baby food out of the microwave and quickly popped in the bottle. When it was warm I brought both over to the highchair, where Shelly had finished the original bottle. “Alright,” I said to her. “Your food is a little too hot, so I brought you another bottle to have first!” I placed it in her mouth, and this time I held it in there for her, chuckling internally to myself as I realized how unnecessary it had been to give her any explanation for the extra bottle when “because I said so” had been a perfectly viable option and we both knew it. In my efforts to slow her down, I tried keeping the bottle only slightly tilted up so that the liquid wouldn’t come out as fast as when she’d been holding the first for herself with her head tilted basically as far back as it would go. That might have added a tiny bit of time, but it didn’t seem like it was enough to make a difference. So, I started wracking my brain for ways to slow the process down as we went through it. As it turns out, though, I’d already stumbled on the perfect solution in the gross goop I was about to feed her. Shelly was already giving it a wary look as I gave the mixture one last stir, but she opened up dutifully for the first bite when I brought it up to her. She’d been eating baby food full time now for several weeks, so she knew the drill. But when it hit her taste buds, any plans she had of a quick and painless lunch before getting into the crib and thus away from me went out the window. “Ugh,” was all she said, or moaned, really, but in doing so most of the bite I’d shoveled into her mouth dribbled back out and onto her face. I’m not quite sure whether she exactly meant to spit it out or not, but it was clear that the reaction was genuine. Each of the jars seemed nasty enough, but altogether they seemed positively horrendous - definitely nothing I’d ever eat! Still, that wasn’t going to be getting her off the hook today! “Oh, do you not like your yummy food, Baby Shelly?” I taunted as I scooped some of it off of her chin with the spoon and held it against her closed lips. “Well, you’re going to have to eat it all if you want to grow up big and strong. And if you don’t want to grow up big and strong, that’s fine, but you still are going to eat it all before you get out of that highchair and I get you ready for bed. I’ve got all day, it’s really your choice!” She didn’t actually say anything back, but she gave me the most incredible look - something between disgust, panic, hatred, and begrudging respect. She would have known that I knew something was up when she suddenly went straight to not only breaking the rules but saying to go ahead with the consequences, and now she could see that I was going to make her earn her way there. It was kind of like only then did she realize that I was also playing cat and mouse, not just her. I just kind of locked eyes with her for a couple of seconds and watched her steel herself, and then she opened her mouth back up, which was my signal to put the rest of the slop that I’d gathered from her face back in there. She seemed to try to swallow it directly off the spoon, but her face said it was only marginally better. I kept the bites coming at a leisurely pace now, really letting her savor her combination lunch/dinner, and enjoyed how some bites somehow seemed to be even more spectacularly bad than others based on whichever flavors had met right there on that spoonful. She made progress as best as she could, but even at my slow speed of attack, I often needed to wait with the spoon for a good five or ten seconds before she could muster up the courage to open up for the next bite. Finally, after maybe twenty minutes, she was done, and she was a complete mess. Despite her relative cooperation, she’d dribbled enough that her lips, chin, and bib were all much messier than I’d seen her since the picture I’d gotten from her very first feeding. “Good girl!” I mockingly praised as she finished. “I bet you’d like a bottle to help wash that down!” Shelly couldn’t help but nod at that, even though she must have known that would add another couple of minutes before she’d get to bed and get me out of her hair. And so I went over to the fridge and grabbed another one, heating it again in the microwave. I grabbed my phone again, and saw that I had another chat in the thread with Gina. “How’s it going?” That gave me an idea, and instead of responding right away, I grabbed the bottle when the microwave beeped and brought it over to Shelly’s highchair. “Now, Baby Shelly, your other big sis Gina wanted to know what you’re up too, so we’re gonna send her a quick little video. And when I tell you, you’re gonna wave hi to her, ok?” She gave me a look of displeasure, and lightly shook her head back and forth. “Oh, you don’t want to?” I asked. “Well, you aren’t getting this bottle or getting out of that highchair until you do, so I’d suggest you cooperate or you can stay there all day!” I didn’t really see her reaction to that because I was already moving behind her and leaving an arm over her shoulder to get into selfie position, but I could see her shoulders drop even a little further, so I had a pretty good sense that she knew she was had. I pressed the little camera button on the Snapchat thread with Gina, ensuring that our reply would be a visual one, made sure that we were both in the shot then held down the camera button to start recording. “Can you wave hi to your big sister Gina, Baby Shelly?” I asked in the most ridiculous coo I could imagine. She lifted her left arm, which was further away from me, and gave a barely perceptible wave. “Oh, I know you can do better than, Baby Shelly! Give Gina a nice big wave!” I took my left arm off of her shoulder and demonstrated for her, as if the problem was that Shelly just didn’t know. Without another option, Shelly did as she was told, giving a still-pretty-weak but somehow kind of perfectly defeated wave. “Good girl!” I praised, then planted a kiss on her forehead and let go of the record button to end the video. “Let’s see how it looks,” I continued excitedly as the playback automatically started, holding my phone so that both Shelly and I could see it. She seemed like she’d rather have the floor eat her up than have to see the replay of her dirty little self waving next to my nicely put-together reflection, but that’s what she had to do. “So cute!” I said, and I gave her another kiss. I pulled the phone back, quickly typed in “not bad (for me)!” and also added a sound on prompt, then pressed send on the missive to Gina before I rounded the tray and placed the nipple between Shelly’s eager lips. She immediately started to suck that thing down with a gusto that was probably even more tied to wanting to wash away the taste than it was to her desire to get into that crib. My guess is that Shelly finished that bottle in less than 5 minutes, and she had me a little nervous that things were going too quickly to really get to the bottom of what was going on. It had been about 40 minutes since she’d initiated the sequence to get into bed, and I estimated that I could stall us at least 10 or 15 more, but I still felt like I might want to buy some more time. So, I walked away and warmed up one more bottle to bring to her nursery with us, then I cleaned up her face and got her down. “Come sit in my lap, baby,” I said as I took a seat on the cavernous pleather loveseat that was in her nursery exclusively so that Baby Shelly could be given bottles before or after naps and bedtime. “I’ve got one more bottle for you since it will be such a long night and we don’t want you to get too thirsty!” Shelly scowled just a little, but carefully positioned her head in my lap so that the feeding could commence. Once again, she put on turbo mode and drained it in short order, but I had another wrinkle up my sleeve, and this time I guided her into a seated position on my lap so that I could burp her. She didn’t need the help, since she’d burped on her own after each of the four that I’d already given her, and she noticeably sighed at the added step, even if it only added maybe a minute or two before she’d burped a few times and seemed to be running out of steam on that front. Just before I let her up, I checked her diaper, which she’d managed to wet without me realizing, which I was a little surprised by. It would have held a lot more, but I figured that with the amount I’d given her to drink and the amount of time she’d be in the crib, I might as well change her while I was changing her into her pajamas. So, we both got up and I took her over to the changing table, but before I helped her up onto it, I had her raise her arms and then worked the snaps free and took off her dress, leaving her naked except for her tights and her diaper. From there I helped her onto the table and had her lay back. As soon as she did, I realized that it might have made more sense to lower her tights at least below her diaper before I’d gotten her up there, since now they were harder to take off since she was laying on them. I grabbed her two legs and boosted them way up in the air so that her lower back was off the table, and then sort of rested her feet on my shoulders so that I could lean in and work the tights down. As I did so, she took a sharp intake of breath, but I thought that maybe my hands were just kind of cold or tickled or something and didn’t think much of it at the time. Pretty soon I had the tights down to just above her knees and I backed up to a more normal standing position at the foot of the table and started to work down each leg individually. As her legs continued to bend at my prodding, she was chewing her lower lip pretty hard, but still I really wasn’t paying any attention to it. Finally, I had her down to just her diaper, and now I opened it up, making all sorts of comments about how wet she was as I cleaned her up and manipulated her legs to wipe and then powder up every little corner. She was squirming now, and her face was really tense, but I was quite sure that was just the embarrassment of having me change her, which was still pretty novel, and she did seem to slightly relax when I finished taping her up and let her legs dangle over the edge of the table while I grabbed something for her to wear for the night from her dresser. There wasn’t a whole lot of options for pajamas, since we were still having her sleep in the onesies with the fingerless gloves to keep her out of any trouble while she was in her crib, so I somewhat indiscriminately grabbed a lavender number from the top of the pile in her drawer. I sat her up on the table, put her head through the head hole, and then worked each of her arms through the sleeves. Once her hands were inside the mittens, their rigid thickness meant that she couldn’t grab at the snug spandex around her wrists, and so she was unable to work the garment off herself until someone helped her by holding onto the mitten while she pulled her hand back, which was kind of brilliant in its simple effectiveness. With her hands all set, I pulled the onesie down her body until it hung around the top of her diaper. At this point in putting a onesie on an adult baby, we’re all faced with a difficult choice. If you have them stand up you get a lot more stretch to bring the two tails together, but then you can’t see the snaps very well to properly line them up. And, if you leave them on the changing table, then you have trouble getting the two tails together without needing to have them boost their back up off the table. But once that is done you can easily do up the snaps. I find I switch back and forth all the time because there isn’t really a better or worse way to do it. For whatever reason, this time I chose the table route, so I nudged her back down onto her back, then gathered up her legs to push her back up off the table so I could grab the tail. As I pushed her legs up, they naturally bent at the knees. This time, in addition to the sharp intake of breath that she’d taken when I was removing her tights, she also let out a small but unmistakable whimper. I couldn't figure out what was happening right away, so I paused, still holding her legs up in the air. Shelly had pulled her mittened hands up to her face and turned away. Then, with a little back pressure from her feet on my hands, I realized that she was pushing. An airy little hiss of gas came just a second later and confirmed what I thought I was seeing and feeling. She was pooping her pants! Apparently the way I was holding her legs was just right, and by forcing her into a squat with her cheeks parted in a way she couldn’t counteract with a clench was enough for the pressure she was feeling to overwhelm her control. I just kept holding her legs up. I was kind of in some sort of awe. We’d all known that she’d always been someone who pooped a lot when we were on family trips or whatever, and Mom had said that even with diapers involved she’d had at least two messes every day that she hadn’t been sent to be early, so it wasn’t like I didn’t understand it would happen eventually. But it was still something else to actually see her do it. The satisfaction that I felt as she pathetically continued to hide her face while she kept pushing for another 30 seconds or so was amazing. I know it wasn’t the first time she’d done it but for me it kind of felt like the first time I’d gotten any sort of reward for all of the crap that she’d put us through for the last year or so. How did she react? Well, I kind of came to my senses when I felt her stop pushing, even though she remained quite tense. I put her legs back down. She seemed to try to see if she could get her feet to catch the bottom of the table so that she could keep the weight off of her diaper as much as possible, but since I’d positioned her so that about half of her thighs were hanging off the table, that wasn’t really possible and they wound up dangling off the edge while her upper legs were flat. Now, though, she’d tipped me off that she was trying to avoid putting pressure on her diaper, so I moved around the side of the table and used a hand under her neck to force her to sit up, causing her to make a face of complete disgust as her weight squished the poop further into her backside. Now, I took advantage of the fact that the shirttail of the onesie was still up above her diaper, and I pulled back the rear panel for a quick peek. The poop wasn’t that huge, but the way the chestnut-colored lump of sludge was filling her crack looked like it was totally gross! “Uh-oh,” I said, letting go of the diaper again and turning my face towards Shelly’s, which was just inches away. She was teetering on the edge of tears, and so red that it seemed vaguely dangerous. “Did you do poopies, Baby Shelly?” She turned away from me as much as she could, but she didn’t really have anywhere to hide. “I think you did!” I continued. “And I think that I know why you were trying to get put to bed. Did you not want your big sis to see you make a stinky diaper, Baby?” She shot me a little look at that point that I think was half loathing and half confusion. Later, I realized that it should have been obvious to me and Gina that that was why she wanted to be put to bed, so that she could avoid us seeing her do it (or changing her), and that she must have thought that I knew. And that made me realize that, if I had known but wanted to see her do it while still technically enforcing the rule, you would have basically done exactly what I did. Find all sorts of reasons to slow things down by messing with my phone? Check. Give her a large amount of gross baby food to make her meal longer and add to the pressure on her tummy? Check. Inject copious amounts of dairy into an already ticking time-bomb? Check. Manipulate her legs at every turn while dressing her to maximize the physical difficulty of holding it? Check. So, I think that Shelly assumed that I was onto her and that I was trying to make her poop, but then what I said planted some doubt. I bet she still kind of thinks I knew what I was doing, but I swear that neither Gina or I connected the dots! But, at the time I didn’t fully understand her expression, and I didn’t really care. Instead, I just pushed her back down onto her back. “Lift up,” I said, and she complied. I grabbed the back of her onesie, and paired it with the front before snapping it shut with four heavy pats on the buttons. “I know you wanted to get to bed as soon as possible,” I said, not really cooing so much as being deliberately snarky now. “So, you can sleep like that and me and Gina will change you in the morning!” I don’t know if she was expecting me to change her then, but she would have been fully prepared to sleep in a dirty diaper all night, so I am almost sure that her look of shock was more about the fact that me and Gina would be changing her. “Oh, did Mommy not tell you that she and Daddy are going away this weekend? Me and Gina will be here to play with you all day tomorrow and Sunday! Won’t that be fun?” Her face said that no, it wouldn’t be, and she seemed totally repulsed by the idea that we’d be changing her. Personally, I couldn’t imagine that we could make it bad enough that it would have been worth sleeping a whole night in a poopy diaper, but I resolved to see if we could live up to her expectations. “Alright, let’s get into beddy-byes, Baby Shelly!” I said, and I helped her sit up a final time before I guided her off the edge and onto the floor. It wasn’t that hard for her to get up into the crib or anything, but I made sure to help her up with a nice firm boost to the seat of her pants. I tucked her in, then I pulled up the side railing, and I waltzed out of the room, practically walking on air as I shut off the light and closed the door behind me. I pulled out my phone again, and I saw that Gina had responded. “She looks so funny! Good job!” she’d said. “I figured it out,” I typed back. “She had to poop.” “But it worked,” I continued in a new message. “She couldn’t wait and I saw her do it. So gross. So right. I let her sleep in it so that we could change her together tomorrow.” After a while, my phone lit up with a chat back from Gina. “OMG!!! That little stinker!” What was the change like? Well, I promised Gina (and Shelly) that I’d wait for her to get there before we changed Shelly, and I was happy to stick to that. I woke up around 8 and had a nice little breakfast and a cup of coffee, and by then Gina had texted me to say she’d be over in 20 minutes. I putzed around on my phone for a little while, and then made sure that I had a bottle warm and some breakfast ready for Shelly for after her change, since I assumed she’d be hungry and thirsty since she’d now been in the crib for, like, three quarters of a day. When Gina came, we basically went right in. I don’t know exactly when or how much Shelly had slept, but she was certainly awake when we entered. “Oh my God,” Gina said to me, “It smells so bad!” She was right. The stink hadn’t really taken over before I’d left yesterday, but by now it was absolutely dominating the room with its pungence. “Oh, yes,” I said, almost as much to Shelly as to Gina, “Baby Shelly is a super stinky girl.” “Does Baby Shelly want a diapee change?” Gina asked her as I lowered the side of the crib. Shelly’s eyes glistened with tears, but she did nod her head. I’m sure it wasn’t even so much a case of want as need, since the one thing that was for sure was that she would have preferred that it came from anyone other than us. Before she could sit up in her crib, I reached between her legs and unfastened the snaps on her onesie so that we didn’t have to deal with that later. “OK, stand up, sweetie” I said, and she swung her legs around and got up, only making a slight face as her weight quickly settled on her butt. “Oh, I bet that felt all yucky, didn’t it?” Gina asked when she saw the expression. Shelly just looked down at the floor. “Help me get this onesie off?” I said to Gina, and we each grabbed a hand and worked it out of the mitten, eventually getting our respective arms all the way out of the sleeves and then we pulled the whole thing over her head, leaving her in just her obviously sagging diaper. “Let’s see!” I continued, tossing the onesie onto the crib mattress for now and pulling back the back panel for a rather needless inspection. “Oh wow, Baby Shelly! That’s a lot more poopy than there was yesterday!” I mocked, though it was entirely true. It’s possible that she hadn’t really finished the first wave when I left her, but even still there had to have been another mess later in the day, because the volume of poop in there had more than doubled. She didn’t say anything, of course, but I wasn’t expecting that, and instead we just guided her up onto the table, with Gina giving her a gratuitous pat on the mushy seat just before she turned around to transition from the step stool to the seated position that she’d need to briefly assume on her way down to her back. Finally, she was prone on the table, resigned to the fact that her big sisters would be changing her dirty diaper. I let Gina do the actual honors, since I’d gotten to witness the actual messing, and I went up to the other end of the table and gave Shelly the bottle that I’d brought in with us. It did seem to slightly calm her down, if only maybe because it gave her something to focus on other than the fact that we were seeing her filthy bum. “Oh my god, eww! I can’t believe you slept in this!” Gina said as she opened up the diaper. Shelly writhed a little at the comment, but she couldn’t possibly blush any further, so most of her reaction was probably left within the confines of her own head. “Can you hold these, actually?” Gina asked, pushing her feet up to where I could wrap my free forearm around them, effectively holding the lower half of Shelly’s back and all of her butt up and off the table. Even from my limited perspective where I could only see the very bottom of her cheeks and her inner thighs, I could see that poop was thickly smeared just about every place imaginable, and I was sure glad to be part of the changing party instead of the one on the table! Shelly wriggled a little as Gina cut through the filth with the baby wipes, but that might have been because the wipes were cold as much as anything. Eventually, Gina was satisfied enough that she rolled up the nasty diaper and wipes into a tight ball, taped it back up, and deposited it in the pail. She fetched a new diaper, unfolded it under Shelly, and took the fact that I was still holding Shelly’s legs up off the table as an invitation to powder her quite thoroughly. Satisfied, she took an ankle in each hand, nodded so that I knew to let go, and eased Shelly down. She brought the front panel back up, and in no time, baby sis was all taped up and ready to be dressed for the new day of fun ahead of us (at least for Gina and I). Does anything else stand out? Well, as we were getting her dressed for the day, Gina and I clued Shelly into a conversation we’d had on the group thread with Mom and Dad the day before. We’d told them about the little stunt that Shelly had pulled by manipulating the talking rule in an attempt to avoid messing in front of me, and we all agreed that if she was going to be using the rule to her advantage, then we needed to change it. Plus, keeping her in the crib for 20 hours at a time long-term didn’t seem that smart - she needed to eat and drink more than that if nothing else. So, we decided that, instead, if Shelly talked to a grown-up, her punishment would be that she’d get no more diaper changes until bedtime. So, if she still didn’t want to get changed by us, she might be able to avoid that on some days we were babysitting, but there were lots of activities we could force her to do that might make her reconsider that choice for next time. It was up to her! Shelly didn’t seem too enthusiastic about that, but also didn’t seem totally crestfallen. I kind of think that she’d already lost by having to mess herself in front of me yesterday and not being able to avoid us changing her anyways, so in some ways she may have already moved on from that tactic. The rest of the weekend was a lot of fun for me and Gina. We kept Baby Shelly more than busy with as many activities as we could think of that seemed fun for us. We don’t get to watch her two-on-one that often, but when we do, we always have a blast! And we had five more poopy diapers to change that weekend, so we each got plenty of chances to remind Shelly of exactly how much she’ll always be the baby sister in this family! I always say that we have to thank Grandpa for being a genius. In any other family business situation, we would have just kicked Shelly out and that would have been that. But because of this rule, the family really did stick together, and now our relationship with Shelly is so much better than I ever could have imagined!

Yup. So, Jackie was Pride, Kori was Sloth, Susie was Lust, and Stephanie was Greed. Those four, I think, basically worked pretty well and still hold up as written. Tory as Envy basically worked, and I could have emphasized it more if I stuck with it. But Gluttony always struck me as an awkward fit for Martha, and the idea I had for Shelly for Wrath was never one I liked. Ironically, what I'll publish in the next couple of weeks for Shelly would fit @rienrien's idea of betrayal and the circles of hell very well, but I never made the connection between the nine babies and the nine circles. Honestly, I even had an idea for a look at the way that the twins are slightly misaligned after a while in my notebook that could have fit limbo and (a mildly tortured, semi-political version of) heresy, but oh well!

You can read her backstory here: But the short answer is that she's incredibly lazy. In fact, my initial idea for Big Baby Steps was to base it around the seven deadly sins like it was an ABDL version of SE7EN (that was going to have to exclude a couple of characters from the universe and gluttony proved too awkward to shoehorn in, so I abandoned it), and Kori was going to be our representative for Sloth. I think it's the hope. As long as there is a chance she has to try, but maybe that only makes things worse.

Epilogue - Black Friday “Alright, baby, Mummy needs some coffee before we get some gas and we get going. You just keep playing with your toys.” Kori let out a sigh, pulling the string on one of the two toys attached to her carseat and causing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to play with a corresponding set of blinking lights as Mummy shut the door and went into the station’s shop. They’d never stopped for gas or anything else during her travels with Mummy, and she’d never even considered this potential avenue for exposure. The station was still in town, and it wasn’t exactly deserted. She had a sun shade providing a bit of protection, and there was nobody on the other side of the pump, but her risk of being seen like this by a stranger was definitely at an all time high. Worse, she was already engaged in a silent struggle to at least prevent pooping for as long as possible. She’d avoided messing herself before falling asleep last night, and her bowels had temporarily quieted by the time Mummy had woken her up at about 7:30, but after her breakfast, last night’s ominous fullness had returned. Mummy had quickly loaded her up in the car “so that we get this one home in time for her nap.” Now, while she wasn’t quite cramping, she was sure that if she pushed she’d be rewarded with a rush of poop hitting the back of her diaper. Since there was a three-hour ride ahead of her, Kori knew that she should wait as long as possible in order to prevent herself from a second straight day with a long stretch in poopy pants. Kori tried to keep her attention on the toy, but she was jumpy, and when a car pulled up at the adjacent pump, she couldn’t prevent herself from turning her head as the music played and the lights flashed. Worse, an attractive young woman about her age emerged from the car and started futzing with the gas cap. Kori felt her mouth go dry with nerves. While Kori looked like a ridiculous parody of infancy and this woman was beautifully put together, Kori couldn’t help noticing how hot she was - just her type, really. And even though she would never have made a move on a stranger at a gas station who probably wasn’t into women anyways, she desperately wanted to avoid being seen this way, just in case, someday, they met again. She froze, deciding that if the woman saw her out of the corner of her eye, hopefully her mind would just say “baby” and move on. The music had ended, but Kori was nervous that the flashing lights would draw attention to herself. She was paralyzed with indecision, and still staring intently at the woman, hoping that she didn’t see her glance returned. Suddenly, the driver’s side door opened, interrupting Kori’s focus. “How come you aren’t playing with your toys, baby?” Mummy asked, in a tone that Kori knew meant she was about to lose her streak. “Crap,” Kori thought, her stomach dropping. She’d probably only stopped for a minute at most, and yet it was almost surely about to cost her all of her hard work over the last three and a half weeks. Was there a way out of this? The pang in her stomach, more of guilt that she’d failed herself than anything else, did remind her of her earlier predicament. Maybe, just maybe, if she started pooping right now, and Mummy had truly just walked up without knowing how long it had been, she could fool her into thinking that the pause was because she’d been distracted with the task of filling her pants. Mummy had (maybe deliberately?) parked so that the car was facing away from the store, so Kori didn’t know if she’d seen enough that she was already doomed, but it was worth a try. Somewhat dramatically, Kori scrunched up her face and grunted as she gave a big push. Sure enough, she was able to produce the poop she suddenly so desperately wanted. The mess in her pants expanded quickly, and Kori felt a strange thrill as she saw Mummy looking at her with a look of recognition that mixed with visible skepticism. Kori could tell she had her considering whether Kori had in fact been misbehaving after all, but maybe she’d seen too much. If only there was a way she could somehow bring it home. “Poo poos, Mummy!” she squealed desperately, finding it a little hard to squeak out the words as she continued to force poop out against the hard resistance of her seat. “Hmm,” Mummy said after a second, “it doesn’t really smell like you were going poo poos before I asked you, and it didn’t really look like it either.” Kori looked down, trying to avoid Mummy’s gaze in case she gave anything away. She made sure to grunt again with another push, figuring she might as well commit, even if the jig seemed to be up. “But maybe…” Mummy continued, causing Kori to look up as she was offered a lifeline. She was so elated at the prospect of keeping her streak that she barely even noticed as the mass of poop oozed further into her crotch as she continued to force the last contents of her bowels out and against the firm pressure of her seat beneath her. “Hmm, but, the thing is, babies don’t know when they make poopies, do they, Kori?” Oh no! Kori hadn’t even thought of that. In her desperation to get away with her inattention, she’d just inarguably broken another rule instead! “No Mummy,” she was forced to squeak. “That wasn’t following the rules at all, was it, baby?” “No Mummy,” she answered again. Failing to own up to her shortcomings (or behave after getting in trouble) could result in even bigger problems. “That’s too bad, you were such a good girl yesterday that I thought maybe you were on your way to growing up, but I guess we can try again tomorrow! Now, get back to playing with your toys while I get us gas. If you are very good on this car ride, maybe I’ll change your stinky bum before naptime even though you were such a naughty girl.” “Yeff Mummy,” Kori squeaked, and she pulled the cord of one of her toys to prove she would. Mummy closed the door, leaving Kori alone with The Wheels on the Bus and her thoughts. She glanced over at the pump next door, and saw that the beautiful woman had already left. Surely, she’d never see her again. And yet she’d allowed the potential of a few seconds of embarrassment that would soon be forgotten to ruin nearly a month of hard and humiliating work. Even worse, in her effort to save herself, she’d only made her situation worse, since now her behavior chart was at zero and she was stuck in a poopy diaper for at least the next three or four hours. The brief feeling of triumph she’d felt as she had deposited the load in her pants was long gone, and she was embarrassed to think that she’d ever thought it might help her. The music ended, and she immediately pulled the cord on the other toy, triggering Row, Row, Row Your Boat to play with more accompanying lights. Kori would be damned if Mummy was going to reenter the car and find silence. She sighed, thinking of how hard she worked yesterday in particular. Her mistakes this morning had her on the verge of tears. Last night she’d been so confident she was getting there, but the truth was that she was barely making progress, and she was still not getting close to six months. Was she really going to be in diapers and eating baby food at Thanksgiving again next year? Kori heard the sound of the gas pump clicking off, and she took a deep breath. Mummy wouldn’t want her wallowing, and. to be honest, it did her no good. She needed to get her mind straight. She still had time to at least make sure that she didn’t make the trip down here for Christmas next year like this, or even in pull-ups, but she needed the streak that was starting tomorrow to be the one. There was no time to be sorry for herself. She let out her breath as Mummy opened the door. It was time to start again.

Kori is very full after Thanksgiving dinner. What does the rest of the day have in store for her? ------ In mere moments, Mummy had escorted her out of the kitchen and they were making a beeline for the playpen once again. As cramped as it had seemed earlier, now Kori found herself grateful for its comparative spaciousness as Mummy helped her over the sides. “Oh, maybe you should check your dollies’ diapies before you get them dressed again!” Still getting down to her knees, Kori picked one up with each hand as she hit the canvas below. There wasn’t a response that neatly fit into the “yes Mummy” or “no Mummy” pattern of answering that she was restricted to. As such, she decided the only way to answer was to demonstratively “check” their diapers. Bringing the first to her face, she gave a big, dramatic sniff of the toy’s backside. “Is your baby poopy?” Mummy asked. Kori was pretty sure that there was no answer that could get her into trouble, and she didn’t really feel like changing them again, so she decided to try it. “No Mummy.” “How about the other one?” Again, Kori brought it to her face. “No Mummy,” she said once more. “Alright, then why don’t you get those babies’ clothes back on, and then you can play with your toys while the grown ups do the dishes and make our desserts, ok?” “Yeff Mummy,” Kori replied, though Mummy was already walking away even as she did. Not knowing how long it would take for the grown-ups to complete that task, and without any guarantee that none of them would wander away to check on her in the interim, Kori got right to getting the dolls dressed. With her full stomach and general malaise after eating such a heavy Thanksgiving dinner, she knew that this was once again a dangerous time for her. If, somehow, she actually fell asleep while playing, there would be no consequences for her, but if she was found laying down trying to bring it on, she could count on her good run of behavior being considered over, which wasn’t something she could chance, even for a much needed rest. Kori knew her increasing awareness of when she risked losing focus on her mandated, babyish behavior had driven the marked progress that she’d made this year. Currently, she’d made it through 23 straight days without a slip up. While that wasn’t an enormous sum, it was already her 4th highest total, and she’d achieved all of them this year. This summer, she’d reached her longest ever streak of 46. She knew that she still had a long way to go, but she hoped that she’d find a decent rhythm and find a way to make a big jump. In fact, the arrival of the holiday season had given Kori a goal. Since she needed to get to six months (183 days, she always told herself, since she neither knew whether they were rounding up or down, or where she was in the leap year cycle), another baby Christmas was already locked in. However, she’d decided to make a real push to do everything she could to avoid being in diapers by Thanksgiving next year. She wasn’t sure whether the next stage in her pathway back to adulthood, potty training, had also doubled when she’d had her original three months of needing to behave increased to six, but she figured that even if she was in that stage it would be infinitely better than her current one. Of course, if she was able to get herself straight through without any more restarts of the calendar, then she’d be past potty training even if she was required to do six months. The only thing she knew about that third stage was that it involved chores, but again, it surely beat the alternative. Despite the theoretical possibilities of the timeline, Kori had been deliberate in her selection of simply being out of diapers as her goal for next year’s holidays. She was trying to keep her own expectations in check, because she didn’t want to get too frustrated if she had a setback and actually lose more time as a result. She’d assumed that when she hit a month, she would sort of have found her stride. In practice, that wasn’t quite how she’d found how it worked. The fact that all three times she’d hit that milestone had come this year illustrated that she had gotten better, but each individual day didn’t really get easier, and so there was no bowling ball effect. It also meant that her progress hadn’t been nearly as linear as she would have hoped. In between her month-long runs, for instance, she’d had multiple streaks that didn’t even get to double digits. At least this year she hadn’t had any streaks where she didn’t even get to two. In the first six months, she’d practically had more ones (or even zeros) than anything else, and had never gotten to 10 even once. By last year, she cut down the number of ones to just three, and now she hit ten more often than not. She had to say, though, as she reached numbers that were unimaginably high even a year ago but still nowhere near the required number, she found it even more demoralizing when she screwed up and all of her weeks of hard work erased in just a few moments of laziness, inattention, or indiscipline. The thought of that disappointment was enough to get Kori to redouble her focus on the toys in front of her. Having finished dressing the dolls, she considered her options. She was practically still bored from her time with the wire maze this morning, and the blocks were a little dangerous because even accidentally spelling a word might get her in some trouble, so she decided to stick with her dollies for the time being. She’d assigned all of her dolls at home a name, mostly because in her boredom she’d taken to doing it one day. Nobody else knew these names since she wasn’t allowed to vocalize such things with actual words, and she wasn’t positive that a few of them hadn’t changed in the first few times that she’d used them, but eventually she had a cast of names that stuck in her head. Kori had to admit that she’d sort of come to take comfort in her little group of imaginary friends some days. She certainly knew they weren’t real, but just having some familiar characters could help her come up with play scenarios that passed a day. And since she wasn’t allowed to vocalize the words she was imagining them saying, she could actually sort of imagine them having more adult conversations if she wanted. Since she didn’t play with the dolls here regularly, she didn’t have any names for them. Now, Kori decided, was the time to fix that. “What’s your name?” she had the one in pink ask the one in blue in a voice inside her head. She barely even registered that she made a little high-pitched giggling noise out loud as she progressed the story in her head. “I’m Gloria,” the other doll answered after Kori thought about it for a moment. “What is your name?” “I’m Nicole. Nice to meet you!” Kori almost surprised herself with the names, which were just the first thing that came to mind. She went on to introduce herself to the dolls, under the theory that if she just learned their names, then they must not know her name either. They were just getting down to deciding what they might all do together with the limited options that they had when a sudden cramp in her stomach told Kori that she wasn’t going to be able to make that decision before taking care of the suddenly urgent matter of emptying some of the fullness from her meal into her diaper. Kori could tell immediately that this wasn’t going to be one of those times where she might stall a bit to stave off the icky feeling of pooping her pants for a little longer. With how full she was, her body was really racing to clear space to process more of the onslaught of mush that she’d just endured. And frankly, because she was so full, she almost welcomed the opportunity to clear the decks, even though she knew that she would immediately regret that sentiment once she had actually done so. Resigned, though, Kori adjusted herself a little higher on her knees to give herself a little room to push. Though she would not trade it for a lack of control, Kori often wished that she didn’t need to physically do the deed that would make her so uncomfortable. With a final exhale of disgust, she stuck her bottom out, puffed her cheeks, and felt a thick, gooey mass to begin to emerge from her slackened sphincter. Unfortunately for Kori, she could tell immediately that this was a particularly nasty load. It was somehow a little warmer than usual, and while it was still nowhere near the solid logs that an adult diet would produce, it was a thicker paste than the soft mush that her diet usually seemed to generate. And, no doubt owing to the massive feast she’d just been fed, she felt like she’d never be done making this horrible mess. She could feel her entire crack had more or less filled in, but still the warm, soft, sticky mass kept caking itself into new corners, fighting against the resistance of her snug diaper and restraining tights to make room wherever it could be found. Her continued pushing caused a creeping invasion of the back half of her crotch, and her cheeks were forced further apart until eventually the mess spread itself onto the interior portions of her fleshy bottom. After at least 30 seconds of constant, productive pushing, Kori was finished. She took a deep breath, straightening herself up a little and gradually snapping back into the world around her. She realized that she was still holding Gloria and Nicole, which was a good reminder that she needed to get back to at least moving them around. If spacing out when she was supposed to be playing was the most common way that she lost her behavior streaks these days, the next most common set of reasons were dirty diapers and her reactions to them. It was understood that physically pooping would require her focus, but she was supposed to get right back to her playing as if she didn’t know what had distracted her for the last minute or so. She also wasn’t allowed to indicate in any way that she knew about the state of her diaper, so not only could she not ask for a change, but changing what she was doing or how she was doing it, or modifying how she followed an instruction to make some accommodation for the state of her diaper was sure to earn her a reset chart. Even though she was currently alone in the room, Kori was eager to avoid that, so she began at least moving the dolls back and forth as she got used to her discomfort. Kori used the token playing as a moment to take stock of her situation. Even over the smells of baking pies she was aware that she was quite stinky. She wished this had come on 15 or 20 minutes ago when everyone had still been at the table. Though the physical process of messing in that tiny high chair would have been quite difficult and it might have been even more humiliating to do it in front of her whole family, the smell she produced in close proximity to the adults might have been enough to earn her a fast diaper change. Now, alone and easier to distance themselves from, she knew that a rapid reprieve was unlikely. Kori worked to collect herself. There was no use in waiting until she got a little more comfortable, because it literally wasn’t going to happen. At first, even a wet diaper had been overwhelmingly miserable for her to sit in waiting for a change. Kori had never been someone with a particularly high tolerance for discomfort, but after running afoul of Mummy’s rules about acknowledging the state of her diapers, she came to realize that she had little choice but to sit in her sogginess until Mummy decided that a change was in order. Weirdly, though, her low tolerance for discomfort actually started to help her in a way. Since she’d need to stay wet no matter what, she eventually decided that she might as well not endure the avoidable discomfort of holding her pee before she traded it for the unavoidable discomfort of a wet diaper. She started to just pee when she felt the need, and eventually she decided that it was even worse for her if the clammy diaper got cold, as it often did when she was depositing a few large wettings a few hours apart. Instead, when she let go more freely, she could often keep it from getting all the way cold. What she hadn’t realized was that that would gradually erode her bladder control, and eventually she realized that she often was wetting her diapers without even really thinking about it. These days, she’d occasionally notice a little spurt of pee escaping her, but she often didn’t even notice the very first time that she wet a new diaper and it moved from dry to wet. While Kori worried that that meant that her potty training phase would actually be difficult from a toileting perspective, in the interim the benefit was that she could go through her life not even really noticing the sopping padding between her legs. The same could not be said for dirty diapers though. For starters, none of the factors that had contributed to Kori’s eventual incontinence applied to messing, so she always had to consciously surrender her dignity to do it. She had to poop more now because of her diet, and she was somewhat more used to doing it, but how long she needed to stay in it was more variable than with a wet diaper, so it was hard to say how hard she should or shouldn’t fight when the need emerged. Plus, it was so much more humiliating to have a poopy diaper than a relatively discrete wet one. But worst of all, there was no such thing as more or less comfortable when it came to a dirty diaper. Even hundreds of dirty diapers into her punishment (and she wasn’t counting, but she knew she must be coming up on 4 figures if she hadn’t already gotten there), the only thing Kori could say was that she’d gotten a little better at not showing her misery even if each one was every bit as horrible as it had been the first time. The best thing, Kori knew, was to try to get herself as immersed in her activity again as she could. Much like with her regular play, if she could get her mind engaged in something it presented a way to take her attention away from the time she needed to pass in her miserable condition. In a messy diaper, small shifts could easily give her a nasty reminder of her reality, but trying to find at least short term distractions beat putting even her resting attention on her discomfort. She didn’t quite have the right headspace to continue with the Mommy role she’d assumed before lunch given the flagrantly babyish state of her diaper, but she decided that she could join in their play as a bit of a role model. Together, she, Gloria, and Nicole played with the wooden blocks for a bit. She taught them how to stack them to make small little pyramids, and would set down one of the two of them and then put one of her hands on each of their arms and helped them to pick up one block at a time. By switching off between the two dolls, Kori was able to construct a little contest between the two of them to see who could build a taller pyramid, and then a taller tower. The switching made the time pass more quickly than it would have if she had just done several in a row with one doll, and there was actually a little bit of difficulty in the stacking because the canvas floor had a bit of give to. Plus, the way that she was holding the dolls’ hands made her grip a little tenuous and put their dangling bodies somewhat at risk of knocking down the towers. Nicole built a higher tower the first time, but Gloria won round two. Kori was just a couple of moves into a third game to break the tie when she heard Mummy, Pop Pop, and Meme walked in. Kori knew better than to stop playing just because they’d entered, but she did glance up just enough to see that each of them carried a slice of pie with them as they breezed by the playpen and took up positions on the couch some 20 feet away. Kori heard clucks of delight over the pie from the grown ups as she continued stacking the blocks with her inanimate playmates. It did smell quite devine, and Kori was sure that it would have been much better than the pudding she’d had for dessert, though even after unloading somewhat, she still would have struggled to have more than just a taste if it had been offered. “Well,” she heard Mummy say with a tinge of satisfied weariness, “that was incredible.” “I know,” Pop Pop said. “I think I could just sit here in peace for days without having to eat again.” “Yup, me too.” Mummy said. “I’m sure you noticed that Kori has a stinky for me to change over there, but if you guys don’t mind, I just want to relax a little while before I deal with any dirty diapers.” “I thought I noticed something when we walked by,” Meme said. “I’m just glad she’s over there so it doesn’t smell too much for us.” Kori was glad she had her back to the grown ups, because her face definitely would have betrayed that she was paying attention to their discussion of her fate even as she helped Nicole to add another block to her tower. She was hopelessly embarrassed to have her poopy diaper so openly and matter-of-factly discussed, and equally disappointed that even with the grown ups now aware of her state, she was still going to be forced to wait indefinitely for someone to do anything about it for her. Still, mind over matter was the name of the game, so Kori quickly got to work building up the drama surrounding Gloria’s next move within her head, since she knew that she was approaching the heights that had proven the failing points of the earlier games. She reached over to grab a block with Gloria, trying to focus on how she really did want to see if “they” could get the tower higher rather than on the sticky shift of the fudgy mass caking her loins as she made the move. Carefully, she placed the block atop the appropriate tower. She felt a slight wobble on the tower, and with her sense of touch limited since she was using the doll’s hands, she tried to find a balance point the way she might have if she were playing Jenga. Carefully, she let it go. It seemed like it might have stayed up, but Gloria’s foot nicked a block about halfway down the tower, causing all 8 of the blocks to fall. Kori was a little crestfallen, both for Gloria and herself. She’d really thought she had it! Technically, Nicole hadn’t won yet, since she was also at 7, but it also meant that even if she succeeded here, there would be no going for a 9th block. Still, she readied herself for Nicole’s turn, switching her mental allegiance to her other imaginary friend’s team and trying to get herself excited for the chance to win the game (even if she would be beating herself). She picked up Nicole and briefly gave her a little pep talk in her internal monologue while semi-consciously making some muffled little squeals to accompany it. Then, they grabbed a block and got to work gingerly placing it. This time, Kori immediately felt that the tower was a little sturdier than Gloria’s had been. She deposited the block, and this time she was very careful to move Nicole away slowly. Sure enough, the block tower held this time! Kori was genuinely pleased with herself, and she couldn’t help but give a little chuckle of satisfaction. “Wow, that’s a big tower that you and your dolly made Baby Kori!” Mummy said suddenly. Kori startled a bit, and actually brushed against the tower with her arm as she turned around to look at Mummy, causing it to topple down to the canvas. She glanced back at it for a moment - surprisingly upset to lose her progress, but didn’t dwell on it since Mummy was still addressing her after somehow managing to sneak up behind her while she was playing with her dolls for the second time this afternoon. Mummy was holding a glass of red wine in one hand, and was holding a bunch of clothes in her other hand. Kori was pleasantly surprised that it looked like she was going to get a change so soon when it had seemed like it might be much longer. “Are you and your dollies having fun with your blocks?” she continued. “Yeff, Mummy,” Kori answered, and while she was slightly embarrassed to admit it, this time she wasn’t only saying it because it was the answer she was required to give. “Good girl!” Mummy said patronizingly. “Now, you look all cooped up in there, and you must have so much energy after that big, yummy din dins! Let’s get you out of there and see if we can do anything about that!” Mummy stepped back to the half wall over the stairs, and set down the clothing and her glass before coming over to the side of the playpen. “Upsie daisy!” she said, sliding her hands under Kori’s armpits and helping her to her feet. Kori, for her part, was careful not to step on any of the blocks as she got up. With the stabilizing support of Mummy’s hand on her arm, she swung her right leg up and over the railing, then did the same with her left once she’d gotten her first foot on the ground. The motion had the horrible effect of spreading her bottom apart, allowing the poop to slide a little lower down in her diaper, only to squeeze it tighter than ever as her legs came back together on the floor, forcing some of the poop out like toothpaste from the tube out the top of her crack and between her legs. The overflow was even starting to climb a little bit up the front of the diaper again, which was a rare and particularly gross sensation that only could come after the biggest messes. “OK,” Mummy said, standing back a little, “I think we need to get you changed first.” “No shit,” Kori thought to herself, though only to herself since no yes or no question had been posed to her. Besides, while the narration could be annoying, at least this time Mummy was telling her something good was going to happen.. “Let’s take off this dress - arms up, little one!” she continued. Kori did as she was told, and Mummy quickly and efficiently removed the dress. She also undid the little bow holding her bonnet in place, leaving Kori in nothing but her tights and the sagging diaper beneath them. Standing there topless in front of her entire family, Kori briefly considered how she’d never fully regain her dignity from this whole process. Even the fact that Meme and Pop Pop were so inured to her immodesty that they weren’t really looking her way the way they surely would if Mummy took off her own shirt was humiliating in a sense. “Arms up!” Mummy said again as she returned from the pile of clothes. Kori complied automatically, and Mummy pulled a pink onesie over her head and hands, then bent down to snap the buttons over her tights and diaper. “Wait a minute!” Kori thought, trying her absolute best not to panic or recoil. Was Mummy not going to change her? She’d just assumed that new clothes would come with a new diaper, but as she did her best to remain casual, she looked over to the pile of clothing on the wall and didn’t see one there, only the discarded clothes and a small pile of accessories. She couldn’t believe it! Once Mummy acknowledged her messy diapers, it was usually just a few minutes until she was changed. Sure, there were usually no other adults around for her to talk to so any acknowledgement was usually to Kori herself, but Kori couldn’t believe she was going to put her in an entirely new outfit when she was so obviously in a dirty diaper beneath. Not only that, but with how smelly she was, surely she was impacting the grown-ups ability to enjoy themselves, right? Despite all these cascading thoughts and increasing despair, Kori did her absolute best not to betray her concern. She could never really tell if the times where Mummy clearly ignored a messy diaper were a sign of her just not wanting to deal with it right then or just a way to test whether Kori would behave herself, but regardless of Mummy’s intentions, they served as the latter. Knowing that even a deer-in-the-headlights look might be enough to ruin weeks of focus and attention if Mummy were in the right mood, Kori just kept sucking hard on her pacifier and letting Mummy mush poop up into her privates as she seemingly secured each button with a much harder push than Kori thought was necessary. After all four were snapped tightly, Mummy went back and grabbed a bright pink tutu, then had Kori step into it. This day, Kori realized, was taking a major turn for the worse. Now that she was thinking about what she was being dressed in instead of her shock at the lack of a change, the tutu was a dead giveaway that Mummy was about to have her do one of her dance videos. While Mummy sometimes didn’t change her into a tutu for dance time, she never put her into a tutu for anything else. Kori was forced to do one of the dance videos more or less every day, but she’d never had to do one while she was at Meme and Pop Pop’s house before, so she’d been taken totally by surprise. In fact, the only time she’d ever done this in front of anyone else besides Mummy was on one of her little “playdates” with one of the other big babies that Mummy had somehow found in their general area. Mummy, Kori knew, didn’t care one bit whether she was surprised, excited, or dismayed - only that she allow herself to be dressed and then dance with appropriate enthusiasm. So, she continued to stand still and wait for Mummy to finish up with the accessories. Mummy was clearly showing her off, as she’d pulled out all the stops for this one. In addition to the tutu, Mummy brought over her “princess crown” (which was what Mummy often called the cheap plastic tiara that was tucked behind her ears) and her fairy wings. Kori obediently held her arms up a final time and allowed them to be brought into position around her shoulders. She particularly hated the wings. They make her look even more stupid than normal, and they were quite uncomfortable. The wire frame of the wings tended to poke her back and they flopped around awkwardly while she moved, but the worst was that the little harness that went around her shoulders and chest was quite restrictive since they were actually sized for a child. “Now, Baby Kori,” Mummy said in the kind of voice preschool teachers use when they are about to announce something very exciting, “since today is a special day, I want you to do a special dance recital for Pop Pop and Meme and Mummy, ok? I know you have been practicing so much and you are such a good dancer now! Won’t that be fun?” “Yeff, Mummy,” Kori said, careful to at least try to feign enough enthusiasm to avoid scrutiny. In truth, all of this seemed particularly rough. The dancing was a pretty humiliating part of her routine, and doing it in front of Meme and Pop Pop was sure to make that worse, especially since she was in such a ridiculous outfit. And while this wouldn’t be her first time dancing in a dirty diaper, almost all of those times had been because she had been overcome by the need to poop during the video, so being forced to start this way almost felt like an unearned punishment. She could only hope Mummy chose one of the shorter videos and she could get it over with and get changed as soon as possible, especially since she was still full enough that it was adding to the sense that this was a chore. Kori allowed herself to be led around the couch where Meme was lounging with the footrest up. Mummy escorted her to about 10 feet in front of the giant TV, then left her and started to futz around with her laptop and an HDMI cord to get YouTube up on the TV. Briefly glancing around, Kori realized that while she was possibly a bit further away from the grown-ups on the couch than she had been in her playpen, she was now absolutely the focus of attention in a way that she hadn’t been when she’d been playing with her dollies behind their back a few minutes ago. It didn’t take long at all for Mummy to establish the connection, and she’d already selected one to play when she switched to the appropriate source on the TV. Seeing the still come up at the front, Kori steeled herself for what was to come. “Are you all ready to do a dance recital for us, Baby Kori?” Mummy said, with the kind of enthusiasm that could almost make you think she actually thought Kori would be excited for this. “Yeff, Mummy,” Kori lisped. Mummy pressed play, then made her way over to the couch to join the watching party. Kori focused intently on the screen as a brief intro told her which of the few different makers of little kids song and dance YouTube videos had produced this one. Naturally, it was the one she found most obnoxious, though at least it wasn’t the one that was mostly just kids reading some nursery rhymes with some music in the background. Those were so not musical that they were hard to dance to, even if what she was about to embark on hardly resembled dancing in any traditional sense. The first song that came on was a funky version of the ABCs. Many of these songs were supposed to be somewhat educational, but Kori was never to pay attention to things like letters, counting, or shapes, but instead just dance to the music. Dancing with grace or rhythm was out of the question. Instead, she more or less just engaged in frantic activity. The biggest thing she usually did was shake and twist at the hips while wildly swinging her arms around, paying almost no attention to the speed or vibe of the song. She’d also been taught to jump around, though not the way an adult would, but rather by kind of just bending forward at the knees and then sort of springing up from her ankles. Mummy had even gone as far as to show her a few videos that came across her Facebook feed of friends’ toddlers dancing around, and instructed her to mimic things like that jump or their jumping spins that would occasionally lead to falls. These were incredibly awkward motions for an adult body, but by now she could execute them fairly routinely at the breakneck speed and apparent enthusiasm required. After the alphabet song, there was a brief transition (and a brief round of patronizing applause and “hoorays” from her amused audience), which gave Kori a few moments to catch her breath. One thing about these videos and the dancing she was required to do to them was that they amounted to pretty significant exercise. In fact, after about ten to fifteen minutes she was usually already breathing pretty heavily, and some of the longer videos were considerably more intense workouts than anything that she’d done prior to her regression. The next song fell into a different category than the first. It contained instructions on how to dance, first telling her to hop like a bunny, then jump like a joey, and finally leap like a froggy. For these songs (“Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” was a classic example), she was to follow the movements of the song as brought to life on screen as faithfully as possible. In this case, two children and an adult, all wearing some odd costumes that didn’t seem related to the song, were acting out the various kinds of jumps, and Kori did the same. The bunny hops weren’t too bad to do, but the jumps were more annoying, as the dancers were kicking their feet out in front of themselves each time they went airborne. The move was physically demanding, and each repetition in her restrictive tights pulled the filthy diaper even tighter across her backside. Kori didn’t even really remember kangaroos ever moving like that. The leap was even worse, since she needed to bend at the knees to put her hands on the ground, then stay in that position but spring her feet off the floor, which now smushed the sodden and soiled crotch of her diaper up into her. She was grateful that after that the song just stuck to the bunny hops for the rest of the way. When the song finished, Kori once again received a series of compliments that could have passed for genuine if they were addressed to an actual toddler but felt much more like jeering to Kori under the current circumstances. She didn’t pay it too much attention though, because she was trying to catch her breath and see what was coming next. The people who made these videos probably had at least 50 songs that they’d recorded, and the videos themselves were just kind of a mash-up of those songs in a seemingly random order designed to run for more or less any amount of time an adult wanted to try to entertain a child with. There were way too many of the videos for Kori to recognize them by their orders, but she did know all of the songs at this point, so she could quickly figure out whether an upcoming song was one where she needed to follow along or actively do the opposite. Sure enough, Kori did recognize that the next song was their strange version of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” The words were basically the same, but there were some additions and the whole rhythm and mood of the song were completely skewed. There was a whole subset of these songs that were completely changed for some reason, while others remained exactly as she remembered. Finally, there was a third group of songs which, as far as she could tell, were completely made up for the purposes of these videos. Of course, while they’d annoyingly be stuck in her head later, Kori didn’t have too much bandwidth while she was actually dancing to pay attention to the songs or their lyrics once she determined they wouldn’t require her to follow any instructions. In fact, that could almost hurt her cause, since she needed to more or less actively ignore the beat. Instead, she’d learned to focus her energies on basically just going nuts. For this song, she decided she’d probably need to go with some spinning since she’d stuck to shaking around for the first sort of free song. She still started with bent knees, and then started shaking and rotating her hips, gradually making the turns fuller and fuller until eventually she needed to move her feet as well in order to continue building momentum. This actually did make her border on being out of control, which was difficult to fake well enough to get the desired effect. Eventually, Kori was just spinning around in a circle with increasing speed. She was always careful not to do that for too long so that she didn’t actually get dizzy, which would only make this worse, so after a few turns she allowed herself to fall to a knee and continue the spinning until she touched down on the same hip and then rolled over onto her bottom, forcing all of her weight to come down on the mess in her pants. She didn’t have time to dwell on that, because it was important to hop right back up and keep dancing. In a practiced move, she flipped herself over to her knees and quickly got herself onto her toes in a squatting position. Then, she popped up in a big hop, landing with a thud and going right into a wild series of shakes, jumps, and single spins for the remainder of the song. As she gyrated, she felt some of the recently smushed, sticky mass slowly loosening the bond between her butt and the padding it was wrapped in. She realized that she probably would be wise to make sure she hit the floor with her simulated falls more often than she normally would so that nobody could possibly accuse her of avoiding it because of her dirty diaper. The songs started to come and go, with some taking only about a minute and others smeeing to last as long as four or five. Eventually, the whole thing fell into a rhythm, as Kori moved from one to the next, working incredibly hard to make sure she kept up her activity level. The longer she went, the more sporadic the grown-ups applause and commentary after the individual songs became. At some point, Kori realized that her dancing had become less of a spectacle and more just the way that the little one was being kept occupied while the adults relaxed. If the grown-ups were getting bored, Kori thought, they should imagine being her. Bored wasn’t exactly the right word, given her focus and activity levels, but she was certainly well and truly tired of it. It was hard to know exactly how long she’d been going, but Kori was quite certain after a while that, at a minimum, she had surpassed the point at which one of the shorter ones would have ended. Since both her diaper and her stomach were very full, she was particularly uncomfortable. And as the time went on she was only getting more and more tired, and it was getting harder and harder to adequately catch her breath behind her bobbing binky in between each song. It was starting to get dark outside, and eventually the lights inside were strong enough that they made the windows act somewhat like mirrors. Briefly, Kori caught a reflection of the scene in one of them during a song called “Open, Shut Them” (which Kori was quite glad to see coming on at this stage of the video since it was one that gave instructions but really only dealt with how she should use her hands, so it provided her with about 90 straight seconds where she could catch her breath, only needing to move her arms and hands to keep up). What she saw bordered on absurdist art. Her three family members could have been anyone, anywhere in the country on this holiday, sitting casually on the couch chatting amongst themselves. That juxtaposition only made her own reflection that much more absurd. Perhaps, if there had been no comparison point revealing that she was, in fact, fully grown, she could have been confused for an actual child, stupidly making crappy little claps and then patting her legs as the video instructed. Her outfit was certainly on point as well - she was a sea of pink, and even her flared tutu did nothing to obscure the obvious thickness of the diaper below. The wings, the tutu, and the tiara combined to make it look like she really was a little kid who had been excited to dress up, especially since a short, high, and deliberately thinned pony tail peaked over the crown (Kori always thought that the way they had her hair thinned during haircuts was particularly cruel). But a close look at the tiara revealed the first sign that something was a little off. It was just a little too small to really look at home on Kori’s head. Combine that with the way that she was clearly dragging herself to continue when she’d gotten well past the red, sweaty, and breathless point at which any toddler would have simply fallen by the wayside or moved onto something new, and you could tell that this was no true baby. Still, the times where Kori caught herself actually looking like a remotely convincing child were always humiliating, and the way that her family was basically just ignoring her even as she strained to keep up her performance only made things worse. Intellectually she knew that she should see her babyish reflection as a sign that she was doing her job well and thus actually advancing her goal of regaining her maturity, but she was struggling to find the silver lining right in the moment. Ten minutes later, Kori couldn’t believe she was still going. Her hopes for just a quick video had long since passed, but eventually she had realized that she was actually getting one of the longer ones. With no way to tell how long she’d been going or where the finish line was, she could only take her body’s exhaustion as an indicator that she’d gone a ways beyond her standard. Her stomach was still uncomfortable and her diaper was as nasty as any she’d ever worn, but she was so wiped that at this point she was almost exclusively focused on just keeping her legs bouncing around with as much energy as she could muster. Finally, mercifully the video came to a close. As it did, the timer came up along with suggested other videos. Kori was shocked to find out she’d been going for 48 minutes! That was easily the longest she’d ever gone, although she had to say that in some ways it had felt even longer. The grown-ups had been paying so little attention to her and the asinine content on the screen that it took them a moment to register that the songs had ended. Kori took the moment to try to catch her breath, unsure whether she should turn to them or await further instruction. Again, she saw herself in the windows, her face extremely flushed from the effort and her hair was greasy from the light coating of her sweat. Her legs felt like jelly, and her tights were clinging to strange places due to the heat and humidity her movements had generated. “Yay! Good job, Baby!” Mummy shouted, interrupting Kori’s self-examination. Meme and Pop Pop were clapping as well, and Kori reluctantly turned to face her smirking audience. “Did you have fun, little one?” Mummy continued. “Yeff Mummy,” Kori said, even though that wasn’t even a tiny bit true. “You must be very tired from all that dancing! But before a recital can end, you have to give a big thank you to all of your fans for all of their cheering! Each of us needs to get a big curtsey and we want to give you a big kiss for doing such a great performance for us!” Kori wanted to groan, both because she didn’t want to put herself on display any more and because she was not a fan of the particularly feminine version of a baby girl that she was forced to play at times like these. However, she’d come so far already that she wasn’t about to throw away all of her effort by demonstrating her displeasure at this comparatively trivial indignity. She was closest to Pop Pop, so she took another couple of steps in his direction until she was maybe two big steps away from him. She put her right foot behind her left, grabbing her tutu and flaring it out as she deeply bent her knees and gave a subtle twist. She did her best to try to look like she was smiling behind her pacifier so that she couldn’t be accused of even the slightest degree of defiance. Straightening back up, Pop Pop reached out his arms to her, so she walked over to where he was seated. “Great dancing, Princess!” he said as she bent awkwardly over the couch and down to where he was. Fortunately, his hands caught the sides of her torso, helping support her as he planted a dramatized kiss right between her eyes. With a slight guide up from Pop Pop, she straightened back up and shuffled a few steps so that she was clearly addressing Meme. She repeated the heavily emphasized curtsey, and again dropped down for a kiss. “We’re so proud of how hard you have worked at your dancing, baby girl!” she said before planting her own patronizing smooch. As Kori got ready to repeat the gesture for Mummy, she considered the praise. Meme really did sound believable. She couldn’t possibly have meant that she was actually proud of or impressed by the dancing, but Kori wondered if she meant it in that she was proud of the work Kori was doing to try to earn her maturity back. Kori never would have thought that 45 minutes of making a fool of herself could earn her respect. Now she wondered if it had. Finally, she dropped down into as deep of a curtsey as her wobbly legs would allow for Mummy, doing her best to make sure she didn’t fail at what she assumed was the last step. Her mind seemed to be playing tricks on her, as on this curtsey she was suddenly much more aware of the horrible mess in her pants shifting around than she had been on either of the previous two times she’d done it. She had to fight off a grimace, instead catching herself and forcing herself to further widen her grin. Kori was about to bend down to present herself for a kiss from Mummy, but before she could, Mummy got up off of the couch. “Thank you for dancing for us, little girl!” she said, confidently leaning in to give Kori a little kiss on the cheek while tousling the back of her hair. “You’re all sweaty and stinky,” she continued, smoothly moving her hand down to take Kori by the wrist. “I think somebody needs a bath.” Kori blushed a bit at the mention of how smelly she was, but the news that she’d be bathed was certainly welcome. Not only did she have a stinky diaper, but she was quite sure that if she’d only had that changed, they would have soon found that her pits were also unpleasantly pungent. Mummy led Kori around the back of the couch. Together, they passed the playpen and made their way over to the stairs. “Ok, Kori, you know what you have to do to be safe going down the stairs. Time to bump on your bum bum, baby!” In all her time in this dirty diaper, Kori hadn’t once considered that this was a nearly inevitable final test of her ability to stoically hide her knowledge of her own mess. It was true that this was how she always went down stairs in the name of safety, her twenty-something-year track record of successfully descending stairs having been disregarded immediately upon her first dirty diaper 2 years ago. At home, though, that was at most an inconvenient but trivial embarrassment, because her nursery and changing table were upstairs, so she’d never need to worry about getting downstairs before a diaper change. Here, though, dirty diapers came with the disgusting additional consequence of needing to bump down the stairs to where her changing supplies were usually kept. Having not pooped since they arrived last night, this was Kori’s first reminder of this unpleasant detail for several months. Kori took a deep breath. This was going to be nasty, but it was absolutely the final test, so she just needed to put her mind over matter. Stopping a few strides short of the stairs as she would at home, she tried her best to get down quickly and casually. She never really thought of how she was getting down when she was in less uncomfortable underwear, so she could only assume that if she moved fast enough she wouldn’t be screwing anything up. She dropped her left knee to the ground, then allowed her free left hand to help her continue her momentum to the left so that she relatively gently flopped onto her backside. Next, she used her legs and hands to drag herself across the remaining five or so feet to the top of the stairs. That, it turned out, was the single grossest thing that she’d done since she’d messed herself more than 90 minutes earlier. The poop that had started to make it to the front panel of her diaper was pulled back up and against her encased vagina, and the much larger mass of mush in the back was smeared into some of the few remaining sections of clean skin on the outer reaches of her butt cheeks. Despite her increasing horror, Kori set her feet down to the second step, then slid herself off the edge of the living room landing and onto the first step. She landed with a sickening splat, pancaking the sludge against herself. She kept her jaw set around her pacifier, and deliberately kept her eyes on the steps below so that any face she did make would be somewhat less likely to be seen by her trailing Mummy. Moving quickly probably made the squishing sensations that she was subjected to worse, but it also meant that Kori was done in only about a minute rather than dragging it out for any longer. After about five steps, the contents seemed to have actually reached the widest spread that it could, and each step, while still unpleasant, at least stopped being quite so traumatic. “Alright,” Mummy said when Kori at last reached the floor, “can you crawl into the bathroom for me, baby? I will be right there.” Kori hated crawling, which she found as uncomfortable as it was inefficient, and considered herself lucky that Mummy didn’t make her do it all that frequently. Still, this wasn’t that bad of an ask in comparison to everything else she’d done over the last hour, so she flipped herself onto her hands and knees and gingerly made her way across the landing and over to the bathroom while Mummy turned into Kori’s room to grab whatever supplies she deemed necessary. The tiles were pleasantly cool, but it seemed like moving over to the bathmat was what Mummy would want her to do, so Kori made her way there then turned herself so that she was kneeling facing the door. Mummy only took a few minutes, entering the room holding a changing mat, a fresh diaper, and all the other supplies that would be needed to clean Kori up. “All right, let’s see,” she sort of whispered to herself, clearly considering the space in front of her. The unfamiliar changing confines meant she had to make logistical considerations that were already accounted for at the home nursery. Eventually, she settled on putting the toilet lid, then set everything down on top of that. “OK,” she said, this time in the much more cheerful baby-talk she reserved for when she was addressing Kori, “arms up for me sweetheart.” Kori did as she was asked as Mummy moved closer, though the wings slightly limited how high she could actually reach. Not for the first time, she felt very small as she knelt with her eyes coming up to Mummy’s chest while she allowed her arms to be manipulated so that the wings could come off and be set aside on the vanity counter. Next, Mummy removed her tiara, then bent low to push the tutu over Kori’s diaper and down to her knees before she undid the snaps on Kori’s onesie. “P-U!” she said dramatically as she came back up, pulling the front of the onesie up and over Kori’s head. “You have a very stinky diaper, little girl! But you must not have even known, or else I’m sure it would have been very uncomfortable to do a whole dance recital in!” Kori knew that Mummy was really just lording the fact that she’d had no choice but to do the dancing in such a state over her, but she didn’t take the bait by reacting in any way. She was getting her change now, so she wasn’t about to get in trouble for relitigating the past hour. Mummy placed the onesie with the accessories, then grabbed the changing mat and spread it out in between her and Kori. “Alright, lay down on here for me, ok my little stinker?” she instructed. The elastic of her tutu just above her knees made shifting herself around slightly more awkward than it otherwise would be, but it wasn’t too difficult for Kori to maneuver her way over and flip herself so that her back and diaper were positioned on the plastic-lined mat. In the meantime, Mummy moved around behind her and turned on the bathwater, then collected the wipes. Just as Kori finished situating herself, she returned and knelt in front of her feet. Casually, Mummy snatched and just as quickly discarded the tutu. Next, she wordlessly grabbed Kori’s ankles and pushed them high enough in the air that her bottom and the small of her back came off the mat. Keeping one hand holding up her charge’s legs, she deftly used the other to slide the tights down over Kori’s diaper. Once the diaper was entirely exposed, she let Kori’s legs down, leaving her with her feet flat on the floor and her knees bent towards the ceiling. Now using two hands, she pulled the clinging clothing over Kori’s knees and slowly worked them down, eventually lifting Kori’s feet back up to take them off. Instinctively, Kori extended her fingers and pressed them against the bathmat beneath her, helping to prevent herself from sliding forward on the changing mat as Mummy pulled her tights off. Finally, Kori was left lying prone in nothing but her diaper. If there was any modesty in being covered in an obviously soiled diaper, Mummy quickly stripped that away from her by tearing off the tapes, leaving Kori and her filthy crotch completely exposed. After two years, however, Kori only got embarrassed about Mummy changing her if she dwelled on it, and, as in most cases, this was a time where it was easy enough to focus on the benefit of this interaction instead of how much shame she felt to be in her position at her age. Mummy didn’t seem to be in the mood to tease her too much despite the shameful state of her diaper area, so Kori was mostly just able to stare at the ceiling in relative piece while Mummy used her grip on her ankles to manipulate her bottom so that she could wipe away the thick mess. Kori had become so used to having someone wipe her butt for her that she was mostly able to ignore it, but she still couldn’t help but clench her jaw around her ever-present pacifier when Mummy’s attention turned to carefully cleaning her dangerously-dirty vagina. Mummy usually did a decent job of keeping her clean enough to avoid UTIs, but it was certainly a risk today given how thickly coated her diaper area had become. After three or four minutes of careful wiping, Kori was deemed clean enough to at least enter the bath. “Alright, into the bath please, sweetie,” Mummy said as she was helping her back to her knees and over the side of the tub. Kori was mildly annoyed by the implication that she could have had any doubt, but she was happy enough for the much-needed refreshment that the bath would provide that she found it easy enough to just let it go and sink back into the bubbles of the supposedly baby-calming bubble bath that Mummy always added to her baths. Little measures like this that were seemingly designed to reinforce her baby status always struck Kori as unnecessary. However, while Kori wasn’t sure if they helped her fall asleep as the bottle promised, she couldn’t deny that they smelled nice enough. Normally, there were a few toys that Kori would be expected to make use of for the first several minutes of the bath, especially in instances like this where Mummy spent the next minute or two balling up her poopy diaper and taking it and the used clothes back to Kori’s room. However, there hadn’t been any investment in bath toys here at Meme and Pop Pop’s, so Kori got another rare moment where she could just sit back and relax. “Alright!” Mummy said, ending the longest period that Kori had been unsupervised without a task to occupy her in months by walking back into the bathroom. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” Mummy got down to her knees on the same bath mat that Kori had just been changed on. She grabbed the large, duck-shaped rinser that she used to pour water over Kori’s head in the bath and dunked it under the bubbles to fill up. “Head back, baby,” she instructed gently, though Kori had already started to tilt back. Once or twice, she’d made the mistake of not adequately leaning back, and the soap that got on her pacifier was unpleasant enough to ensure it never happened again. The warm water cascaded over her head and down her back, turning her light brown hair nearly black for the time being. It was always a slight shock to transition from dry to wet so suddenly, but it also felt so good, especially since Kori had been more than a little greasy beforehand. Next, Mummy put a small squirt of shampoo in her hand, then rubbed both hands together to foam it up slightly. Leaning in so that her left hand could reach over to the far side of Kori’s head, she began to work the shampoo into Kori’s hair. Kori felt a number of gentle tugs, but one upside of the extreme hair-thinning that she regularly experienced at the salon was that she didn’t get significant snarls in her hair so Mummy never found pain points when washing her hair. When the shampoo was well lathered in Kori’s hair, Mummy once again filled the ducky up with water. Kori turned her face to the ceiling, and Mummy poured it over her, using her other hand to work out some of the soap. This step was repeated several times, until finally Mummy was satisfied that there was no more shampoo in Kori’s hair. The bubbles in the bath were impractical in this sense, since they sometimes added to the soap in Kori’s hair, but none of Kori’s punishment was particularly practical for her or the grown-ups, and this was hardly the most egregious example. As ever, the next thing Mummy did was to pick up the face cloth. At home, this was actually one of any number of little glove-puppets shaped like cutesy animals that could be used to scrub Kori clean, but here it was just a standard red square. She dropped her hand under the water’s surface, then brought it back up, with the now-sopping cloth sagging enough to show the outline of her outstretched fingers. Kori closed her eyes as Mummy brought the cloth up to her face. Mummy used the meat of her palm to scrub away at Kori’s forehead, slowly working the soapy face cloth down her nose, wide to her cheeks, and to the area immediately surrounding the plastic face shield of her oversized pacifier. That area usually remained a slightly spitty place during a bath, but it got its own attention when Kori was wiped clean after a meal or a drippy bottle. Just as it seemed like Mummy was finishing up with her face, Kori was surprised when the cloth was brought right back up. This time, as she frantically snapped her eyes shut just in time to protect her eyes from the soapy water, she felt Mummy bring the cloth a little above her hairline, pressing her hand only on the very top side of the facecloth, allowing the rest of it to fall off of her hand and over Kori’s eyes, nose, and mouth. “Uh oh!” she said in faux distress. “Where did Baby Kori go? Hmm...I know she was just here a second ago! Where could she be?” Kori felt ridiculous, sitting there stark naked while Mummy went through the act, but this was a game she knew, so she prepared herself for what she knew would come next. “Oh there you are!” Mummy said with some mixture of mock surprise and mock relief as she removed the facecloth and let it splash into the water below with a splat. Kori forced herself to grin as widely as she possibly could, and mustered up a little giggle. The giggle never really came out as babyish-sounding as the other words and sounds she made, but Mummy seemed willing to overlook it if the effort was there. “Were you hiding from me, silly goose?” “Yeff Mummy,” Kori answered, trying her best to sound cheerful “Well, I’m glad I found you! I didn’t realize you wanted to play!” Kori had hoped that that would be a one-off, but at least the only effort that could really be expected of her while she was sitting in the tub was to feign interest. Mummy slowly brought her hands together and up in front of her face. “Uh oh, where’d Mummy go?” she asked. Kori actually could see Mummy’s face a little bit still from her angle, but they both knew that didn’t really matter. “Peekaboo!” Mummy continued, dramatically dropping her hands back down and revealing an emphasized grin of her own. “Mummy is right here!” Kori gave the most enthusiastic fake giggle she could muster. Next Mummy dropped her face down below the side of the tub, repeating her questions about where she could have gone with a tone of mock concern. At this point, you could make a case that she actually looked more absurd than Kori, knelt on the floor with her face bent back down towards it, pretending she couldn’t be seen even though her butt was sticking high in the air. Of course, Kori had to humor her, but she still felt like Mummy was making at least as much of a fool of herself as she was of Kori. Mummy pulled out just a couple more tricks, first standing up and wrapping herself behind the shower curtain, then slowly exiting the room, making sure to leave her head inside the door for a while, only to briefly withdraw it then pop it back in as if it was some big surprise that she hadn’t really gone away. In reality, Kori would have preferred if Mummy really did leave, even if it was just for a few minutes, so that she could just quietly enjoy the luxury of a nice soak, but instead she forced herself to be good and pay rapt attention, bursting into an unconvincing but sufficient fit of giggles each time Mummy revealed herself. Fortunately, despite her seeming to actually enjoy the game even more than Kori was forced to pretend to, Mummy didn’t carry on for more than a minute or two. As she got back to her knees to finish the scrubbing, Kori could tell that she wasn’t the only one feeling the predictable drowsiness after this afternoon’s giant meal. “Let’s finish getting you clean, silly,” Mummy said as she wearily fished the facecloth out from under the water. Indeed, Mummy did exactly that. She’d become quite an expert at manipulating Kori within a bathtub so that she could scrub every last inch of her, and this time she seemed to be making a point to spend extra time invasively probing Kori’s diaper area. Frankly, Kori didn’t mind the prolonged attention, since it helped to make sure that there would be no trace of her disgusting afternoon when she was taped into her next diaper. In a blink, bath time was over, and Mummy helped Kori stand up. Kori found herself shivering slightly as she stood naked and wet in the chilly air while remaining warm water quickly fell further and further down her ankles and through the open drain. Mummy came to her rescue with a towel, which she used to wipe Kori’s upper body dry. Next, she somewhat roughly ran it over Kori’s head and hair, and since Kori didn’t have that much left to speak of, about 30 seconds was enough to get it manageably dry. With the water now gone except for a couple of lingering bubbles that congregated near the drain, Mummy turned her attention to Kori’s lower half, drying her butt and then individually propping up Kori’s legs onto the side of the tub so that she could more easily run the towel over them. “Alright,” Mummy said when she’d gotten Kori mostly dry, “let’s get you back into a new diaper before you make pee-pees all over Meme and Pop Pop’s floor.” Kori probably should have been embarrassed, but she knew that Mummy was speaking from experience. As Kori’s bladder control had waned, they’d needed to change up Kori’s after-bath routine. For more than a year, Mummy had escorted Kori back to the nursery after baths, but a three separate incidents within a month in which Kori had dribbled onto the carpet during the short trip to the changing table had convinced Mummy that Kori really wasn’t faking anything and would need an immediate diaper in order to prevent future messes. For Kori’s part, the accidents had been quite humiliating, since although she knew her control had greatly diminished, the diapers had somewhat ironically hidden how much she needed them from Mummy. By the time Mummy made the switch to diapering her on the floor in front of the tub, the cat was out of the bag, but at least Kori had the relative privacy of having any pee that escaped getting discreetly trapped by the padding below her. Kori dropped herself onto the vinyl mat on the floor, and did what she could to relax her body to help expedite the process as Mummy manipulated her legs through the steps of powdering and diapering. “There you go, all safe in your diapers for the night!” Mummy said when she was finished. She reached down and grasped each of Kori’s hands, helping Kori sit up while she herself got to her feet from her knees. She pulled Kori up off of her bottom, and all in one motion she had Kori up and began leading her out of the bathroom and back to the makeshift nursery. When they got to her room, Kori saw someone had moved the playpen back into the room while she had been in the bath. The little mattress had been set back up once more, so Kori assumed that bedtime was imminent. Confirming her suspicions, Mummy dropped her hand and bent into the bag of clothes and accessories she’d brought for Kori, and she quickly came back up with a lavender fleece footed sleeper. She helped Kori step into each leg, maneuvered her arms into the sleeves, and zipped her into the pajamas for the night. Kori welcomed the soft, warm embrace of the garment around her, as it instantly helped erase the chill that she hadn’t quite been able to shake even after Mummy had dried her off after her bath. “OK, hop up onto the bed for me, ok sweetie?” Mummy said, really directing Kori rather than asking her. Kori did as she was told while Mummy walked around the foot of the bed. As she passed the dresser, she carefully picked up three bottles that had been sitting on the empty dresser that was somewhat tucked behind the door. Kori hadn’t noticed them until she’d followed Mummy with her gaze. Normally, she’d only get one bottle before bed, and while she was a bit thirsty from her efforts in the living room earlier, she really neither wanted or needed anything more than that. “Since you didn’t really get din-dins like usual,” Mummy said, setting the bottles down on the nightstand and climbing up onto the bed and sitting with her back propped against the headboards, “we’ll give you a couple extra bottles so that you don’t go hungry. Sound good, princess?” Mummy patted her lap, indicating to Kori that regardless of how little she appreciated the dinner she hadn’t missed at all being replaced, it was time for her to report for her feeding. “Yeff, Mummy,” Kori said, scurrying over in hopes that her slight delay in recognizing and answering Mummy’s yes or no question would be forgiven if she showed enough hustle. If Mummy had noticed, she fortunately didn’t make an issue of it, and instead she simply plucked the binky from Kori’s mouth as she cradled her head in the crook of her elbow and immediately replaced it’s nipple with the first bottle’s. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving, baby girl?” Mummy asked as she held the bottle in place. This time, Kori knew that she wasn’t expected to answer since her mouth was busy sucking down the formula. “I know I did!” Mummy continued. “Do you know what I am thankful for, princess? It’s you, Baby Kori!” She was squealing in (presumably) mock excitement. “You’ve been such a good girl today, and such a pretty girl too! And you did great dancing for me and Meme and Pop Pop. I know we are all thankful that you showed us how good of a dancer you are!” Kori just kept slurping at her bottle. She’d wondered if Mummy could possibly be thankful for those things. She supposed that she herself was thankful for having succeeded at being good today, but she certainly couldn’t say that she was thankful for Mummy, and she absolutely wasn’t thankful for her time dancing in her dirty diaper earlier. Honestly, she couldn’t think of much of anything she was genuinely thankful for, about today or in general. Kori settled into the rhythm of the bottles, and she was able to finish the first of her bottles in a little less than ten minutes. Shortly after Mummy replaced its teat with the second’s, Meme and Pop Pop came into the room. “Oh, don’t you look darling cuddling with your Mummy while you drink your night-night bottles!” Meme said. To Kori, it almost seemed like she was genuine, which was mind-blowing. She couldn’t possibly think that this cute, or like seeing her daughters like this, could she? And yet, while there seemed to be an undercurrent of mocking to all of her family’s comments towards her, there were lots of times where it really did seem like she was enjoying having Kori there the way that people enjoyed having a baby around. “We just wanted to say night-night before you go beddy-byes, baby girl. We love you very much!” Meme leaned in and gave her a kiss on the side of her face, then cleared out a bit so that Pop Pop could come in and do the same. Kori wasn’t expected to do anything and Mummy kept the bottle firmly planted in her mouth, so she just kept draining her bottle. “Sleep tight, princess,” Pop Pop said, and then they retreated back out of the room, leaving Kori alone with Mummy once again. In a minute or two, Kori was done with the second bottle, and Mummy switched it out for the third. Kori desperately wished she could somehow avoid it, since the fullness that had only just started to dissipate a little bit prior to the bottles was back with a vengeance. Of course, she had no real recourse, so when the nipple brushed her lips, she locked onto it and tried to work her way through it as quickly as possible so that she could at least get burped and rid herself of some of the most immediate bloating and gassiness caused by the onslaught of formula. As Kori worked, Mummy gently brushed her hair with her hand, which she had to admit was somewhat comforting. Kori actually had to briefly pause a couple of times to take some deep breaths to help herself through the fullness, but finally the slurping sounds got louder as she got to the last few drops and then Mummy eased the bottle out of her mouth. “All gone!” she practically sang at Kori as she popped the pacifier back in before Kori really even had time to register what it felt like to not have a nipple of some kind in her mouth. “Yummy yummy, huh baby?” “Yeff Mummy,” Kori answered, wondering if Mummy would be able to make herself lie if she were the one asked about the taste of several bottles of infant formula. “Let’s see if you have any burps in there,” Mummy continued, gently guiding Kori into the position that promised relief. The patting delivered its promised results. Kori produced a couple of satisfying belches. Over the years, she’d discovered that she could position herself so that her pacifier was supported by Mummy’s shoulder, allowing her to open lift her upper jaw off the pacifier so that she could really open up her mouth when she burped, which brought more relief than she got when she kept her mouth clamped around her binky. After a point, though, the burps somewhat dried up, and Kori was forced to accept that she’d extracted all of the relief she could from releasing gas, meaning that she’d have to rely on time to release the rest of her fullness. Mummy must have sensed the lost momentum, because she curtailed the burping not long after Kori herself had recognized that the end was nearing. “All done!” she said as she adjusted Kori off of her shoulder and briefly came face to face with her in something more akin to the position she’d fed her in. “Oh, you look so exhausted. Good thing it’s time for sleepies for little girls!” Kori was tired, and also glad that another day’s worth of tests and torments was coming to an end, so she allowed herself to be guided off the bed, where she briefly stood in the small space between the bed and playpen while Mummy pulled the blanket off the mattress so that only the fitted sheet remained on it. While she did, Kori noticed the clock on the back of the dresser, which showed 5:58. That was about an hour and a half earlier than she’d normally go to sleep, but honestly Kori was tired enough that she’d only worry about that in the morning if she found herself awake with no way to kill time (or even to know how long she needed to kill, since the clock was too far back on the dresser to see from inside the playpen). Mummy was ready in just a few seconds, and she wasted no time in helping Kori over the side one last time. Once inside, Kori got herself down on her knees and moved onto her side, situating her head as far up on the small pillow as possible. Even so, she needed to angle herself and bend at both the waist and the knees just so that she could sort of fit in. Her feet still stretched the mesh side of the makeshift crib, and she wouldn’t say she was particularly comfortable. After she’d spent a few moments settling into the best position she could find, she went a little still and looked up at Mummy, who correctly interpreted the glance as a sign she was ready and dropped the comforter down over Kori. “Sweet dreams, sleepyhead,” she said, planting a kiss on Kori’s cheek as she finished arranging the blanket around her face. Mummy straightened back up, flicked on the baby monitor, and then turned out the lights as she closed the door behind her. Kori blinked a few times to adjust to the light. Between the nightlight plugged in in the corner and the red glow of the unseen digital clock face on the dresser above, it was still plenty bright enough to see, although almost as soon as she did adjust, Kori closed her eyes once again. She took a few deep breaths and wriggled around a bit in an attempt to settle into a position that she’d be able to sleep in. Her day had been exhausting enough that she was confident that she’d find sleep soon enough, but she wondered how the rest of the night would go. Her dancing had been such a workout that she was concerned she might be a little sore tomorrow, and surely her cramped position would only make it worse. With each slight movement, she felt her full stomach churn a little ominously. She could feel that she was still very much in the process of digesting her dinner from earlier, and the addition of so much formula a few minutes ago gave her the feeling of a ticking time bomb. Hopefully, she’d fall asleep before any issues, as usually that meant she’d be ok until morning. If not, well, she shuddered to think. Tucked into a fetal position, she’d have absolutely no chance, and with her early bedtime she might be looking at twelve hours before any messy diaper might be attended to. Kori did her best to put that thought out of her mind, knowing that if anything, thinking about it would only increase the chances she did need to mess herself before she fell asleep for the night. Still, there was just a bit of tension left over from her particularly humiliating day that felt like it needed to be exercised if she was to fall asleep. Not for the first time, she wished masturbating was an option. Just a few frenetic seconds thinking about some romantic getaway with a beautiful lover would surely release that nervous energy and send her off to sleep with peaceful dreams of the future she’d surely realize after this was over. She’d tried it once, getting over the disgust of reaching into her diapers about four months in and feeling with almost astounding bliss the pleasure of even just her own fingers after going so long without any release at all. Before she could even climax, though, Mummy had burst through the door, turning on the lights and catching her in the act that she’d apparently heard on the monitor. After the only spanking she’d ever received, which left her wailing like an actual toddler, she’d had her behavior chart reset and her punishment increased from three months to six. Since then, while Kori’s body was on some days so tempted that it became a major distraction from her baby activities, she’d decided that it was never worth the risk of another increase in the time she needed to serve. She just needed to get through this, and then she could have that back along with the thousands of other pleasures small and large that she’d missed out on these past few years. With no option for physically releasing her tension, Kori turned her attention to celebrating making it through the day without any slip ups. As always, the first thing that came to mind was that she’d extended her behavior streak to 24 days. That was no small feat, especially given the added variables and humiliations that the holiday had brought. She thought back to how Mummy’s reflections on Thanksgiving had made her think of how she wasn’t really thankful for, and realized that that wasn’t entirely true. She was thankful for the streak she had going, and she was even more thankful that Christmas would be at Mummy’s house. Come to think of it, as long as she kept it going, this was going to be her last holiday in the baby phase of her punishment. She’d keep her attention high, and her behavior perfect, and by the time Christmas came and it was time to come back here for a holiday, she’d be through potty training, even if that phase was 6 months too. Yeah, she thought, she had made it through the hardest day possible. The rest wouldn’t be easy, but she’d do it. That, she decided, was definitely something to be thankful for. Feeling relieved, adjusted herself just slightly, and started counting deep breaths in through her nose, and out through her mouth, which often helped her escape any troubles of the day and fall asleep. Perhaps subconsciously knowing that, at least until she finished another successful day tomorrow, it was the most important number in her life, she drifted off to sleep right as she finished letting out her 24th breath. The difficult day was truly over.

If I am Kori (and I do write her thought processes!) I can't afford to think about that. Just have to try to find out. No, please. As a loyal reader, you know I'd never let anything bad happen to any of my characters. ?

"A full helping of awful" could be my tagline. But, thanks! Glad I'm not the only one! Hah - probably just about the only fully original thing you'll see in one of my stories! The sort of traditional baby dresses can be lots of fun, but sometimes making the little look completely absurd is even more fun.

Jackie may be the character that we know the most about within her little world, but a lot of her other little "friends" are also busy getting into new and interesting (and, most of all, embarrassing) things all the time! As we start the holiday season (at least in the US - sorry if this feels untimely for our Canadian friends!), let's see what joys Thanksgiving is bringing for Baby Kori. If you aren't familiar with Kori, she is mentioned in various levels of detail in: Big Baby Steps The Haircut Pushing Boundaries I'll post the conclusion to this story the Monday before Thanksgiving! ------ The first thing Kori noticed when she was nudged awake was that her feet were stopped by something as she stretched her legs. Her eyes snapped open, but even before she did she knew enough to remember where she was and that she needed to get her head in the game right away. As if to confirm her immediate thoughts, she saw that it was her mother, or Meme, as she now called her, who had jostled her awake rather than Mummy. “Wakey, wakey, Baby Kori!” she said when she met Kori’s eyes. “Did you have a good nap, little one?” “Yeff, Meme,” she squeaked from behind her ever-present pacifier. In truth, she had not really slept all that well. Trips to Meme and Pop Pop’s house, which happened a couple of weekends a year, always promised a bit of added discomfort. In addition to the three hour drive down to Newport News spent stuffed in her restrictive car seat, she then had to sleep in the quite-uncomfortable pack n play, whose mesh sides her feet had run into moments before. The whole thing made it a little difficult to actually sleep, and especially to sleep well, since it was nowhere near long enough for her to stretch out and instead she needed to try to find sleep scrunched up into a tight ball. She never would have thought she’d long for her crib at home, but these trips had proved that it could be worse. She and Mummy had arrived the night before, as today was Thanksgiving. Her Mummy and their parents switched off with the major holidays, so this year Meme and Pop Pop were hosting Thanksgiving, and Mummy would host Christmas, and next year it would switch. So far, despite knowing it was the holiday, the morning had mostly passed pretty normally except for the extra embarrassment of having to play her baby role in front of her parents in addition to her Mummy. She’d been woken up, fed breakfast, sent off to play for awhile, and then fed lunch before being put down for the nap she was groggily emerging from. “Let’s get you a clean diaper, huh baby?” Meme said, pulling back the blanket that Kori had been nestled beneath and helping her flip over onto her hands and knees. From there, Kori put her hands on the railing of the playpen and pushed herself up, swinging her leg over the side. Meme helped guide her foot down to the floor, which was a few inches below the bottom of the playpen. Once she was down, her mother continued to hold her by the back of the arm as she shuffled a few steps over to her old twin bed, which now served as her changing table when she was at her parents’ house. “Let’s take your onesie off before you sit,” Meme cooed, reaching into Kori’s crotch and fishing around a bit until she found and unbuttoned the snaps, all the while putting enough gentle pressure on the sodden padding underneath to make sure Kori knew exactly why she was due for a diaper change. Kori more or less stood still as Meme worked the white onesie adorned with a unicorn pattern over her head, leaving her standing there with just an orange pacifier in her mouth and her drooping teddy bear printed diaper. Knowing what was expected of her, she sat on the edge of bed before swinging her legs up and situating herself on the waiting changing mat. While Meme gathered the supplies she’d need for the change, Kori had a rare moment where there was nothing expected of her. She took stock of the strange situation she found herself in. Most of the time, she didn’t really dwell on that too much anymore, but weekends like these still had enough novelty that she couldn’t help but dwell on it a little. Looking around, her room looked basically the same as she had left it when she moved out of her parents’ house a little less than 4 years ago. The only thing that really looked out of place was the playpen that she’d just been released from. Sitting on the bed waiting for a diaper change, it was clear that she was really what had changed. Even the name that she called her mother had changed. She hadn’t really realized how important the names Meme and Pop Pop would be to internalize when they were first dictated to her as a way to differentiate between Mummy, which she was now to call her sister Anna, who served as her primary caregiver, and their actual mother. However, after her first time seeing Meme and Pop Pop, she realized that failing to address them by the proper names would count as not acting like a baby and would see her behavior chart turn back to zero. Furthermore, the presence of Meme at the same time as Mummy could prove a little disorienting, and the first few times that she’d seen them she’d also mistakenly referred to Mummy as Anna, which had led to resets as well. As such, she now made every effort, even in her head, to think of her parents only as Meme and Pop Pop. It mostly worked, although they didn’t come up quite enough for it to be fully automatic for her in the same way that she now only thought of Mummy exclusively by that name. It was embarrassing to think about how regressive some of her little automations were, but it was undeniable that working to change her thinking about things like Mummy, Meme, and Pop Pop’s names in her head had helped her improve her ability to advance towards her behavior goals. Similarly, over time the ridiculous lisp that was required of her had more or less become her actual voice. She was pretty confident that she could still drop her voice to her previous octave and annunciate correctly if she were allowed to, but after about a year of needing to remind herself to move to a high pitch and lisp out her words (though her pacifier mostly took care of the latter for her), she realized one day that any time she was put on the spot to answer Mummy she could now do so without having to pay any attention to modulating her voice accordingly. While she maybe should have been concerned by that development, the reality was that she was quite pleased when she noticed, because it was one less way that she could lose her progress towards getting out of diapers and eventually out of this punishment entirely. Her reflections were interrupted by the first pass of the cold wipe across her exposed undercarriage, bringing her attention back to the immediate sensations of the diaper change that Meme was administering. She had to admit that while being wiped was embarrassingly invasive, it did give her skin a welcome break from the vaguely warm clamminess that would surely return when she inevitably started dribbling spurts into her next diaper within the coming half hour. It was only a few more seconds before Meme had doused her privates with baby powder and rubbed it in, furthering her pleasant sense of dryness for the time being. Once the new diaper had replaced the old, her mother helped her sit up again, leaving her feet dangling off the side of the bed. “Let’s get you dressed, baby!” she cooed. Kori had certainly assumed that that would be coming next, but by now she was used to the grown ups needlessly narrating what was happening as if it wasn’t usually entirely predictable. She sat patiently while Meme grabbed an outfit from the large bag that Mummy had brought with enough clothes and diapers to be sure to cover her for their two-day trip and then some. When Meme returned, she wordlessly began working a pair of white tights over Kori’s feet, eventually getting them stretched up to her lower thighs before placing her arms underneath Kori’s shoulders and gently helping her down to a standing position and finishing the job of hiking up the tights well above Kori’s diaper to at least the middle of her stomach. Next, she grabbed a black dress that Kori didn’t recognize. In fact, black was a color she very rarely wore, as most of the clothes that Mummy tended to pick for her relied on infantile pastels or girlish purples and pinks for their color pallets. Automatically, she allowed Meme to guide her arms and head through the appropriate openings. When she reemerged from the brief period of darkness within the outfit, she was better able to assess what she was wearing. It was almost entirely black, but had a white collar and white bow at the gathering point before the skirt. Meme was already returning with another garment when she looked back up, and this time she was adorned with a plain, rather old-fashioned white bonnet. Kori instinctively looked over to the mirror in the corner, and though she wasn’t fully facing it, there was no missing the effect that she was dressed like a small child in a pilgrim outfit. She blushed a little, but realistically she knew there were no outfits that could have been chosen for her that would have come anywhere close to the modest sweatshirt and jeans she’d have chosen for herself, so she didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. Now that Kori was all fixed up, Meme turned her attention to the playpen. Kori watched her bend down and remove the comforter and the pillow she’d just been sleeping with and place them at the head of the bed above. Next she reached in and carefully removed the foam mattress pad with the waterproof cover that was inserted to allow Kori to sleep in a little more comfort, dropping it atop the growing pile of bedding. Now empty, she pressed the release button and effortlessly folded the playpen into a more carryable shape. “Follow me, baby girl!” she directed Kori, who had been uselessly standing there waiting for the familiar changeover to be completed. Meme led the way out the door and into the hallway, with Kori padding along behind her as instructed. Meme and Pop Pop lived in a ranch style house, with the common areas and master bedroom on the upper floor, while Kori and Mummy’s childhood bedrooms and a bathroom took up the space in the basement that wasn’t occupied by the two car garage and the laundry/mudroom, so in just a few steps they reached the bottom of the stairs. One of the baby behaviors that Kori was required to adhere to was to always hold a grown-up’s hand and the railing when going up stairs, and to bump down stairs on her bottom, so she automatically reached out for Meme’s hand. Meme had perhaps forgotten, but when she felt Kori’s hand brush her arm, she recognized why her daughter was doing that and adjusted herself to take the offered hand. “Good girl!” she praised. “It’s always good to be safe on the stairs, isn’t it?” “Yeff, Meme,” she lisped quietly, not exactly taking the same pride her mother was at least pretending to take. They crested the stairs and turned right, where the landing area opened out to the spacious family room that had always served as the centerpiece of the house. Kori once again stood idly while Meme unfolded the playpen in the open area behind the sectional sofa. When she’d finished that, she returned to where she’d left Kori and took her hand, leading her over to the couch. For the first time, Kori noted that there was a bottle on the end table next to it. With her routine thrown off by the unfamiliar surroundings, she hadn’t really noticed that she hadn’t been fed one after her nap as she usually was, but it seemed that that was about to be rectified. Still holding Kori’s hand, Meme settled herself into a corner, then pulled the big baby down next to her. Kori automatically brought her legs up onto the couch so that she could lay across her lap, and soon her head was nestled on the padded arm of the sofa. While her legs and head were comfortable enough on the plush cushions, having her back raised across Meme’s legs rendered the overall position less than comfortable. Even as Kori adjusted herself, Meme grabbed the waiting bottle, and in just seconds she’d removed Kori’s binky and replaced it with the nipple. Kori wasn’t terribly thirsty and was no fan of the formula that she was forced to slurp down with tremendous regularity, but she certainly wasn’t permitted to politely decline, so she got to work downing her seventh bottle of the stuff so far today. As she worked her way through the bottle, Kori had a moment to settle into her surroundings. She noticed that the Thanksgiving parade was on the enormous TV on the far wall. Kori couldn’t actually see if because Meme had slightly manipulated her head so that she was facing towards her rather than the wall with the TV, and the bonnet’s slight interference with her peripheral vision was enough to ensure that the parade was nothing more than background noise. That was probably just as well, because diverting her attention towards the TV, and especially towards “grown-up” shows, when she was supposed to be busy doing even something as passive as drinking her bottle, would probably have been enough to justify a reset of her behavior chart. In their own way, the wonderful smells coming from the adjacent kitchen and dining area were nearly as distracting as the TV. In addition to the obvious smell of turkey cooking, she could also detect some rolls being cooked and other vegetables being prepared. All of it was quite pleasant, even if she knew that she’d be getting none of it, and that her replacement would be far less appealing. Having made exclusive use of them now for more than two years, Kori could now nurse down a bottle in just a few minutes, and so the feeding didn’t last very long. The downside of working at that speed was that she did take in a tremendous amount on air as she did it, and so the burping that Meme provided her with afterwards was more than welcome, even if it did come with a few little comments about how she was a gassy girl each time she let out a quick belch. “Alright, let’s go over to your playpen, Baby Kori,” Meme suggested, apparently satisfied that Kori had expelled enough of the air in her system that she wouldn’t spit up (not that that was actually much of a threat given Kori’s actual age). Kori allowed herself to be guided down from the couch to the floor, then accompanied Meme around the sofa and back across the room to the playpen, where she was helped over the nearly hip-high railings. Once she was fully inside, she lowered herself down to her knees, easily taking up half of the space in the cramped quarters she was confined to. At Mummy’s house, she did have a playpen, but it was a custom wood piece that afforded her probably 4 or 5 times as much space. Even then, most of the times that Mummy needed to confine her to a limited space because she needed to focus on work or cooking without Kori wandering too much during her play, she used a series of plastic walls/gates around most of Kori’s larger toys to create a spacious perimeter in which Kori was to play. As she settled into the tight space, Meme went across to the half wall above the stairs and gathered a few toys for Kori to attempt to entertain herself with. She returned with a pair of baby dolls, a couple dozen small baby blocks, and one of those little maze toys where you move beads over winding wires, setting them down in front of Kori. “Alright baby,” she said, “Meme needs to go help Mummy and Pop Pop finish making din-dins. You have fun in here, alright?” Meme left before Kori even had time to squeak out a “yeff, Meme,” confirming that nobody really cared whether she was actually enthusiastic about the activities she’d been left to so long as she faked it well enough. Now alone in the room, Kori briefly thought through her limited options. She knew better than to let down her guard for even a second, since, should anyone come into the room and she wasn’t actively engaged in her playing, she’d be right back to square one in her quest to earn back some of her maturity. The first thing she did, to avoid any accidental temptation, was turn herself within the playpen so that she had her back to the TV. The parade was still on, and if she wasn’t facing it, there was no way she might accidentally look up at the screen just as somebody walked in. Next, she considered her toys. At Mummy’s house, she had accumulated dozens of toys, including some quite large ones like a miniature shopping cart and cash register set, a mock kitchen, and a stroller that she could put some of her many dolls in. While they weren’t truly stimulating for her, she could jump around between them, which meant she could switch to something new when she felt her ability to actively engage with a given toy or activity waning. But Meme and Pop Pop only had a very limited selection of toys, since she was so rarely here to use them. The danger of losing focus was only heightened by the fact that she’d already spent the morning playing with these toys, and even by the end of that session she’d been mind-numbingly bored, struggling just to maintain enough focus to keep moving the beads back and forth on their predetermined routes. Opting out due to lack of interest wasn’t an option, though, so Kori decided to pick up the two baby dolls and push through as intently as possible. Most of the time that she got her behavior chart reset these days, it was because she more or less just zoned out and stopped playing for long enough that Mummy noticed that she was no longer following the instructions to play. To try to combat that, she’d been working on teaching herself to “zone in” as much as possible. To her, zoning in meant reaching a point where she was just playing with a toy without thinking about how she needed to be playing with it. This basically entailed trying to concoct some sort of compelling story in her head of what was going on with the toys that she was playing with. She was encouraged to make little squeaks and noises for her toys when appropriate, so long as they weren’t recognizable as actual words, but in her head she would provide actual dialogue to accompany the little babbles that she was making on behalf of her dolls and stuffed animals. She knew it was basically no different than a toddler playing pretend, but when she achieved something compelling enough she could actually make an entire morning or afternoon pass pretty quickly and borderline enjoyably. Besides, acting like a toddler was exactly what she was supposed to be doing, so she told herself she was just following directions. This afternoon, she decided to think of herself as the two dolls’ mother. It was an admittedly childish and unoriginal premise, but she didn’t have a lot to work with. She realized quickly that she was slightly up a dead end since she really had no other accessories for the babies to use. At home, she had a toy bottle she sometimes fed her dolls, and she’d mimic the cooing that Mummy often did to her when feeding her a real one. Combined with a burping afterwards, this could easily kill 10 minutes, but here she had nothing to use with the dolls today. Just as she was considering whether to see what numbers and letters were on the blocks, a bit of inspiration struck! Almost accidentally, she realized that both of the baby dolls’ outfits could come off. Since they were from the same set, she decided that she’d switch their outfits. There were enough pieces to the outfits that she’d surely be able to pass a decent amount of time. With some renewed enthusiasm, Kori set down the one that was dressed in a pink dress and got to work undressing the one that was in a blue outfit. This was more of a skirt and shirt combination, with a little bib as well. Kori worked off the bib first, and then the shirt. When she removed the skirt, her fingers hit the velcro on one side of the little diaper that the doll was wearing. Kori wondered if the other had a changeable diaper as well. She could swap those as well, while pretending to wipe them, and that would take even more time! Sure enough, when she had finished removing the headband, dress, and inexplicable little pants that the second doll had, it too had a changeable diaper. This was perfect! Kori took off the first one and made a show of lifting the doll’s legs. She wiped it with an imaginary wipe, making a little high-pitched mutter as she clucked in her head about how messy the doll’s bum was and what a stinky girl she was. Next, she pretended to shake some powder on the baby. At this point, she realized that if she was actually to have the dolls trade diapers, she’d need to switch to addressing the other one. “Just like your sister,” she found herself “saying” to the second doll while making a corresponding noise, “such a smelly girl.” She continued with the simulated change, grabbing the first diaper she’d removed and velcroing it onto the second doll. “Oh, are you changing your dollies’ diapers, Baby Kori?” Mummy suddenly said from behind Kori, causing her to jump a little. She hadn’t even heard her come into the room. “Yeff, Mummy,” she said. “Were they stinky babies?” Mummy asked, not at all trying to hide how patronizing she was being. “Yeff, Mummy,” Kori answered again. With Mummy standing above her while she knelt in the playpen, she felt about a foot tall, even if she was actually the slightly taller of the two. “Just like you are a stinky baby sometimes, huh Kori?” “Y-Yeff Mummy,” she squeaked a little more quietly, now staring down at the floor of the playpen with embarrassment. “That’s right! Ok, can you put your other baby’s diaper back on? We can’t have her making a mess, can we?” “No Mummy,” Kori answered, and she quickly put the toy diaper on the doll. The game wasn’t remotely fun anymore, but she wasn’t about to show that. “Alright, Baby, it’s time for your Thanksgiving dinner now!” Mummy said once the diaper had been closed up. Kori allowed herself to be helped up to her feet, almost dazed as she did. Her zoning in must have worked, as she was surprised that it was dinner time. Even though she knew this was going to be a shorter stint than she might normally have expected, it had only felt like she’d been in the playpen for a few minutes before she had been interrupted. And she’d been so immersed that she’d hadn’t even noticed Mummy coming into the room, so she was certainly glad that she’d at least been distracted by her play rather than something unacceptable like the TV. Once Mummy had helped her out of the playpen, she led her out into the kitchen. Meme was still busy cooking, but they didn’t really stop, instead proceeding through the open-concept room over to the waiting highchair that had been pulled up to the nicely-set dining table. Kori needed no further instructions, and she got up in the highchair. Much like the playpen, this highchair was not sized up the way the one she had at home was, so it was a tight fit when the tray was snapped into place. Kori was thankful that she and the family all had “skinny genes,” or else it would be a truly uncomfortable perch Mummy turned back to the table briefly, and returned with a bib, which she secured around Kori’s neck. Kori glanced down and saw that it featured a comic-style turkey, with the phrase “gobble me up” written beneath it. She always wondered where they found all of this stuff. “Pop Pop is going to come feed you while Meme and I finish up the grown-ups food, ok Baby Kori?” Mummy asked. “Yeff Mummy,” she squeaked. If she had had any choice, of course, she would have declined. This was the moment that she’d been dreading all day. Sensibly, everyone else had not eaten any lunch, but she hadn’t been afforded that option. She saw that the grandfather clock behind the head of the table read 2:30, and she could deduce that her fairly substantial lunch had only finished a little more than two hours ago. Combined with the bottle she’d had after lunch and the one she’d just been fed, she honestly wasn’t even the slightest bit hungry. She also knew that this was not going to be any ordinary dinner. Pop Pop was approaching now with a bowl that probably normally would have been reserved for serving - much larger than the cereal bowl-sized dishes that usually contained her food - and she could see that it was more or less all the way full. Over on the countertop next to the microwave, she could see the empty jars that had once held the food she was about to be fed. She saw what looked like at least 15 jars before Pop Pop got too close and she wasn’t able to see anymore, and while she hadn’t been able to make out each label’s words, she was certain she’d seen pictures indicating multiple turkey varieties, squash, peas, and carrots. Prepared individually, and with some nice seasonings, she was sure that would have made the start of a nice feast, but all blended together in a plain, liquified form, the steaming mountain of mush that was placed down on the tray in front of her was little more than a nightmare. “Alright, here comes your yummy din-dins princess,” Pop Pop said, planting a little smooch on her forehead afterwards. He was surely aware of how unappetizing the food was, but you would never know it from his tone as he plunged the spoon into the bowl. Resigned to her unpleasant fate, Kori opened up her mouth for the first bite. When the spoon dropped its load onto her tongue, it was at least as bad as she’d anticipated. It was almost impossible to describe it. In a certain way it was bland, but every flavor that there was in there was mildly bad on its own, and the mix only seemed to accentuate the worst of each. When eating other meals, she could at least kind of isolate what the vaguely gross, totally unseasoned taste was supposed to be, but with everything mixed together like this, that was impossible, meaning that she couldn’t even place what the unpleasant slop really was. She choked down the first spoonful as quickly as possible, and while she made a face, she gamely opened back up for the next one. It was best to get this over with. For a while, that kind of worked, and she built a bit of a rhythm with Pop Pop that allowed her to probably get about half way through without too much discomfort and only a pretty small amount on her lips and chin. At about that halfway point though, she became so full that she sort of hit a wall. It became harder and harder to put mind over matter and just quickly swallow and move on to the next spoonful. Around the same time, Mummy started to bring over some of the sides of the real meal and set them on the table, which briefly distracted her and caused most of a whole spoonful to end up on her face and bib rather than in her mouth. In theory, that was that much less of the terrible baby food that she had to eat, but it made Kori feel gross on the outside in addition to inside her mouth and stomach. Combined with the taunting of the actual appetizing foods being laid out in front of her, her meal suddenly became even more disgusting. Still, Pop Pop’s onslaught was relentless. Bite after bite, he cheerfully scooped even more into her mouth. Kori started to feel like even when she swallowed, there was still more of it in her mouth, though probably that was just the aftertaste coating each and every one of her taste buds by this point. After 20 minutes of completely continuous eating that felt more like an hour, she mercifully swallowed the last mouthful. She took a long, deep breath. The pressure in her abdomen was immense, as she was well beyond comfortably full. Just as she slumped back to try to find a bit of comfort, Mummy came over. “Alright, Dad, I think you’re needed for carving the turkey. I’ll take it from here,” she said. Kori couldn’t really fathom what she meant, but then as Pop Pop grabbed the bowl and walked over towards the sink, she saw that Mummy had two bottles of formula in her hands. If she didn’t know better, Kori was pretty sure she would have screamed. While they might help her to wash this putrid aftertaste out of her mouth, more of anything going into her stomach was the last thing that she wanted right now. Not to mention that the formula would just leave its own milky, almost sour aftertaste when she was finished. If Mummy had known how much Kori didn’t want those bottles, Kori was quite sure that would have only increased her resolve to give them to her. As it was, Kori was sure that she must have at least some idea of how full she was, and any attempt to put herself in Kori’s shoes would have told her just how much 16 ounces of imitation breast milk would only add fuel to the raging storm. Still, she was completely undeterred, and she strode around behind Kori, tilted her head back, and pushed the nipple against Kori’s lips. The stuffed big baby had little choice but to part her lips and start sucking. As she worked her way through the first bottle, Kori realized she needed to proceed pretty slowly. If she took in too much air, there was some actual risk this time that a burp really could bring a little bit of her food back up, and that would just be disgusting. As she did at some point each day, she found herself absolutely longing for even a bottle of water. She had literally had nothing but this formula to drink since it was first introduced on the third day of her regression, and had come to learn all of its disadvantages. Of course, the first on that list had to be the taste. Prior to this punishment, she probably hadn’t had milk in a decade, and to switch to drinking this strange version of it had confirmed that she just didn’t like it. After so long, Kori almost couldn’t taste it now if she didn’t think about it, but only almost. It also never really seemed to quench her thirst the way water could. While she was given almost a gallon of it a day, which was enough to keep her diapers absolutely soaked at most times, something about the way it was always served warm and always left a film in her mouth often seemed to make her want a drink more after she was done than she had before. And, most importantly in the current moment, it was filling and bloating. While water could sometimes help ease the feeling of a full stomach, this was only making her feel even more like she might burst out of her clothes. Eventually, Kori had made her way through the bottles, and as she lowered her head, she saw that the turkey had made its way over to the table while she’d been stuck staring up at the ceiling. The feast was complete, and perhaps for that reason, Mummy didn’t linger for a burping, or to wipe the excess food off of her face, either of which might have helped her to find a tiny bit of comfort. Instead, she quickly dashed across the room to her purse, and produced her iPad. She came back over to the table, pressing a few buttons as she did so. Approaching Kori once more, she set the device down on the tray. “Alright, baby,” she narrated. “So you don’t get bored Mummy got you a game to play while the grown-ups eat. You keep playing - I don’t want to see that screen lock or you will be in big trouble!” Kori hadn’t been assigned this task before, but instantly she knew how she’d be graded. The consequence of inactivity would be that the screen would lock, and surely when Mummy came back over and saw that, she’d find her behavior chart back at zero even before Mummy would have time to enter her passcode. With the stakes being set, Kori immediately snapped her attention to the screen in front of her while Mummy took a seat at the table. Not knowing how long the screen would stay active before it locked, Kori immediately put her finger on the touch screen and moved it around a little. Assured now that she had at least a few moments, she actually looked to see what game was in front of her. All that the title page of the app said was “Play to Learn,” with a green button underneath that said “Play,” which Kori pushed. After a second of loading, a farm scene came up, with a number of animals either right in the foreground or peaking out of pens or stables. On the side of a screen, stood a farmer. “Which animal says moo?” the farmer suddenly asked, surprising Kori a little. She hadn’t expected the game to make any noise, so even with the volume being set quite softly it had caught her off guard. After a moment’s reflection, she supposed it made sense, since the app was almost surely meant for children too young to read. She looked around quickly. Surely, the grown-ups had heard it, but they had carried on with their conversations as if it hadn’t even happened. No answer bank came up after the question, so Kori surmised that she’d need to touch the cow in the center of the screen. “Great job!” the farmer said when she did so. “Now, do you know what animal says meow?” Kori found a cat lounging by the corner of the barn, and duly selected it, once again being rewarded with the cheaply-animated farmer’s chipper praise. The pattern repeated itself. Kori hadn’t totally taken in that there were a dozen animals on the screen when she started, but even then, going through them only took a few minutes. When she finished, the farmer led her through a game where she had to match upside-down cards of the different animals. That was marginally more interesting, but with only 24 cards, it still posed basically no challenge and only took a few minutes to complete. That rolled over to a game where she was shown a group of each type of animal, and needed to select how many of them were in the group. After the counting game, she was transported to a new backdrop, and this time went through a round of games that centered on identifying, counting, and placing shapes. Before long, she reached some sort of aquarium-like world that seemed to use fish to teach colors. The way that they used the tank for a matching game was perhaps mildly more interesting than most of the others, but it still didn’t bring much to the table. When the third fish game finished, Kori was dismayed to be taken back to the farm, and the cycle began repeating again. Mercifully, the farmer at least asked about the animal sounds in a different order, but now the painfully simple questions didn’t even have novelty. Having lived through it for years without any reprieve now, she was used to being talked to and forced to engage as if she was no smarter than your average toddler, but this repetitiveness was only going to make her time pass that much slower. Looking around, she saw that the grownups were still slowly picking away at their meals, all the while chatting idly and seemingly not paying her any mind. Perhaps knowing that the screen lock could essentially monitor Kori’s effort for her, Mummy seemed not to be watching her for activity level at all. Fortunately for Kori, the game at least required a little less of her brain and attention than playing the way she was required to did, so while it was maybe even more boring, it wasn’t quite as exhausting. Even though this game was terrible, she couldn’t help but reflect on the irony of now being forced to focus on a video game, when her inability to stop doing so had been her downfall. Kori genuinely loved video games, and had been the classic “gamer girl” in many ways. In high school, she and her friends had spent many late nights exploring all of the latest releases. By college, she perhaps should have noticed signs of a problem. While she graduated easily enough, she’d skipped more classes each year to keep playing. Even some of her friends had suggested that she might want to try to lighten up on how much she played, but she’d dismissed it. When she went home after she graduated, she’d had every intention of getting a job, but then Fortnite had been released, and she’d found herself spending almost all of her time playing it and none of her time applying for things. And, since it had a phone version, she’d even played it at work during a brief period of employment at a convenience store her parents’ friends owned. She’d never fully admitted it then, but by the time that she’d peed herself a couple of times and Mummy demoted her to diapers, she did actually have a problem (not that the punishment fit the crime in her mind). Two years of digital detox had definitely changed some of the ways that she thought, but she’d be lying if she said that getting back to being able to play games (real games, not this baby stuff) was part of the reason she was working so hard to earn her maturity. Eventually, Kori sensed herself feeling more and more uncomfortable. She was still so full, and time to digest really didn’t seem to be helping at all. Beyond that, the baby food on her lips and chin was becoming increasingly dry, turning it into a caked-on crust. While it wasn’t really her fault, she felt like a disgusting slob, especially watching the others neatly eating their food with their forks and knives while occasionally dabbing their napkins to the corners of their lips. While she was incredibly full, she couldn’t help being jealous of their dining experiences. As she fought her boredom and her discomfort, she couldn’t help but wonder what was taking them so long. It seemed like they were occasionally grabbing an extra bite or two of a dish that had particularly caught their fancy, but they were mostly just chatting away while sipping their wine. Because of the volume of the game and her need to be paying at least somewhat close attention, she wasn’t really able to track their conversation too closely. What she could see from the clock was that they’d been sitting there for 45 minutes already. She suspected that she’d managed to eat more actual food in less than half the time, even if she didn’t need to do any chewing. Still, she had to endure another 15 minutes of the mindless game, going through the cycle of the worlds a couple times before Mummy, Pop Pop, and Meme finally got up with a series of groans and started to bring the dishes out to the kitchen. After the first round, Mummy came over and took a quick look at the iPad. “Oh, are you learning about colors?” she asked Kori in a thick coo. “Yeff Mummy,” Kori chirped, though of course learning wasn’t really the best word for what she was doing. “Can you show me, princess?” Kori picked out the purple fish, as the game had just prompted. “Good job, Baby Kori! I’m so proud of how smart you are!” Mummy’s syrupy praise was obviously a tease, and yet she almost delivered it convincingly enough that you’d think she actually meant it. “Now,” she continued, “I’m sure you want to keep playing, but we have a special treat for you!” Kori certainly wasn’t shedding any tears as Mummy took the iPad off of her tray and back over to her purse. However, if previous holidays were any guide, she was about to be fed some sort of dessert. And sure enough, she watched Mummy go over to the fridge and remove a pudding cup from it. Kori sighed. Holiday desserts posed a unique dilemma for her. On the one hand, the assertion that they were a treat was more or less true. While it was still always something she could be spoon-fed, it was basically the only time that she wasn’t fed actual baby food the whole year. Things like the pudding she was about to get weren’t exactly gourmet, they were so much better than she was used to. However, she was never given it at a time when she was anything less than completely and utterly stuffed. The result was that she wasn’t actually able to enjoy the indulgence she was allowed. With no option to defer, she decided to try her best to savor the pudding that Mummy was now walking over to her with. “Are you ready for some yummy pudding, sweetie pie!” Mummy said as she arrived. “Yeff Mummy,” Kori said, trying to see if sounding enthusiastic could actually make her a little more enthusiastic. Mummy plunged the spoon into the cup, stirred a bit, and then emerged with a sizable glob. Kori opened up, and in it went, though the size of the spoonful meant that a little bit hit her top lip and stuck outside her mouth. Closing her mouth around the spoon as Mummy removed it, she was rewarded with the remainder of the spoonful staying in her mouth. It was, for sure, tasty. It was so much sweeter than anything she usually got. In fact, it was the sort of sweet that only little kids really like, but since she wasn’t used to any sugar at all, it didn’t really strike her as actually being overdone the way that it immediately would have if she’d had it while eating a couple of years ago. For now though, she savored it, letting the chocolatey sweetness coat her entire mouth before she swallowed. The swallow, though, practically brought her back to reality. For one thing, Mummy already had the next spoonful on its way towards her mouth, so she needed to open back up. The quickness with which she was fed could be a small mercy when she was being fed gross baby food, but in this case it stopped any attempts to savor the treat. But with the swallow, she’d realized that maybe getting things over with wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Sure, the pudding tasted amazing by her standards, but pumping the heavy, sugary dairy product into her already full belly had been just as painful as she’d might have imagined. In fact, by the end of the cup, she was glad that it was pretty small. The sweetness of the pudding was becoming somewhat overwhelming, even if it was preferable to the runny slop she’d had an hour ago, but her stomach was so full that she felt like she might explode. Finally, mercifully, Kori was able to get back the last bite. Exhausted, she slumped back as far as the restrictive high chair would let her, enjoying the moment without her pacifier to take a couple of deep breaths. “Are you a little full in your tummy, Baby?” Mummy asked, chuckling a little. “Let’s get you something to help wash that down with. I’ll be right back.” Kori was so dismayed she almost reacted, which certainly wouldn’t have been a good idea. She couldn’t believe that they were going to give her even more milk. Surely Mummy knew that that wouldn’t help at all, right? “Here we go!” Mummy said when she returned, planting the bottle into Kori’s open mouth. Even this full, she automatically closed her lips around it. Finishing that bottle was akin to torture for Kori, but somehow she managed to slowly fight her way through it. She slurped down the last bubbly bit of the formula with a mix of triumph, relief and agony, once again opening up her mouth for some deep breaths as Mummy eased the nipple out from between her lips. “All gone! You were a thirsty girl, huh baby?” Mummy asked. “Yeff Mummy,” Kori replied obediently. She hoped to god that that required answer wasn’t interpreted as wanting more. “Yes you were! Yes you were!” Mummy cooed, getting louder and moving closer before planting a patronizing kiss on her forehead. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You were a very messy eater!” Kori was relieved to hear that she’d be getting cleaned up instead of getting anything more added to her overtaxed digestive system. Getting her face cleaned would indeed help her feel a bit better. She was quite a mess. While she couldn’t see herself, she could see that her bib was a total disgrace, with the brownish main course drying and somewhat covered by a few stray bits of pudding. Meanwhile, she could feel the dried food making a fairly wide, crusty ring around her mouth, plus globs of fresher, thicker pudding on both her upper lip and chin as well. She could even feel a drop or two of milk that had leaked out from the corners of her mouth during her latest bottle. Mummy walked away briefly, depositing the bottle in the sink before heading over to her purse once more. This time, she returned with a travel packet of baby wipes. Taking one out, she somewhat brusquely took it to Kori’s face. Apparently, she needed to scrub a little to get all of the drying food off. After a second wipe that seemed to Kori to be more akin to a rinse than the initial scrubbing, she did finally feel a little fresher. “There we go, allll better!” Mummy exclaimed, placing the dirty wipes on the tray and removing the similarly soiled bib from around her neck. Finally, Mummy removed the tray that had held Kori in the seat. Looking down, she really took in just how ridiculously oversized she was for the seat. Her diapered bottom was basically stuffed into every last inch of the width of the chair, and the headrest was actually supporting the middle of her back. Even her slender legs had practically been touching the bottom of the tray, and the waist strap was so hopelessly overmatched by the thickness of her diaper that they hadn’t even bothered to try to get it around her. Considered in this light, she was certain that the tiny, restricting seat had probably been contributing to her discomfort. Gratefully, she accepted Mummy’s hand and climbed out of the seat, feeling her cramped legs loosen a little as she started to follow her lead.