2011

I'm looking for two stories that I think are fairly well known.  1. The New Girl in School, by Jilly Poo. It used to be on DailyDiapers before the 2017 crash, and then it was on abdlstoryforum, but that's gone. 2. The Trying Policy (I think the author's name had Sea Otter, not sure though) Would anyone maybe have these, or know where they could be found?

Chapter 22 — The Long Sail South The long sail south was shorter than the title suggests, one full day after the Cape and a last morning before we left the ship, but it felt long in the way certain days do when weather closes the world down around them. We had come back from North Cape after two in the morning, slept behind the curtains Ellen had pulled against the endless daylight, and woke so late on Tuesday that the breakfast staff had begun clearing the room around us. There was a late-honeymoon feeling between us that morning, the promise from the night before settled into the room without needing to be opened and inspected again over eggs. We were tired and pleased and inclined to find each other funnier than the evidence supported. Ellen told me that permanence did not entitle me to a second pastry. I told her the North Cape vow had contained no baked-goods schedule and that terms introduced after signature were unenforceable. We spent what remained of the morning walking the inside promenade, because the outside deck had already become too windy for pleasure and because neither of us had the energy for an organised activity. The ship moved through a long grey swell, rising with a slow confidence and then settling into the hollow beyond it, and the glasses in the bars had acquired folded cloths beneath them. Crew members appeared with the unobtrusive efficiency of people who had read a forecast the passengers had not, fastening doors, moving flower arrangements and distributing paper bags beside the lifts. I was enjoying it. I have never been particularly troubled by ships, and the movement felt to me like evidence that we were genuinely at sea rather than staying in a hotel that had made an administrative claim to navigation. Ellen said the distinction was idiotic, then yawned so widely she had to stop walking. The storm was not making her ill. The North Cape was making her tired. We had been awake until nearly three, after a day ashore and a night in the wind, and the woman who can ordinarily organize fatigue out of existence had reached the edge of what scheduling could do. Shortly before one, with lunch still ahead and my midday change due not long after, she admitted she wanted to lie down. Not sleep, she said, only close her eyes for twenty minutes while the ship did its unnecessary moving. "Wake me at half past," she told me as we entered the cabin. "I'll change you, then we'll have lunch." She put the cards on the bedside table for afterward, drew the curtains halfway and lay down on top of the duvet without even taking off her cardigan, which should have warned me that twenty minutes was an estimate produced without access to the relevant data. She was asleep before I had settled in the chair. Not drifting, not resting her eyes, but properly asleep, her breathing deep and even and one hand still resting where it had fallen beside her. I read until half past one. When the minute changed on the clock I put the book down, stood and went as far as the bed. Then I did not wake her. This requires some explanation, because it sounds at first like either disobedience or a very small act of revenge by a man who had spent a year being woken, checked, changed and redirected according to somebody else's clock. It was neither. I could see how tired she was. I could also feel the state of the Pampers beneath the bodysuit, knew when she had put it on me after breakfast and knew, from the flight out and the Tromsø day, that it was nowhere near its limit. The change was due because Ellen liked the day divided into secure intervals, not because a leak was approaching at half past one with an appointment. There was, however, a difference between deciding I could wait and doing anything about it myself. The zip still ended beyond my hands. I could not remove the bodysuit, could not reach the tapes and could not quietly change myself while Ellen slept, even if some ancient surviving piece of pride had proposed it. She was three metres away, fully capable of waking, and I was choosing not to wake her. At two I reconsidered. At half past two I reconsidered again, which is to say I stood in the bathroom, pressed a hand through the cotton at the front and performed the sort of approximate assessment Ellen would have dismissed as amateur work. The product was wet and heavier than it had been at half past one, but still comfortable and secure. If I became worried I could wake her. If I needed the whole arrangement to stop, the safeword existed for exactly the moments when ordinary authority and ordinary circumstances no longer fitted. Nothing prevented me from asking except the fact that I did not yet need to ask. So I let her sleep. I closed the curtains the rest of the way, turned the card on the door so Ari would not come in and went to the buffet while the corridors were quiet. I returned with sandwiches under covers, fruit, two bottles of water and tea I knew would be cold by the time she woke, because caring for someone often involves preparing the wrong temperature of beverage several hours in advance. I put the tray on the desk, wedged the bottles where the ship could not roll them away and left the cards unopened. The storm strengthened during the afternoon. Rain crossed the balcony glass almost horizontally, the cabin creaked in places we had not heard before and every so often something heavy shifted behind a wall with a sound that made me reconsider the engineering of ships in general. Ellen slept through all of it. I read, watched the clock and listened to her breathe, and somewhere in the third hour my concern changed direction. I was no longer wondering how long my Pampers could wait. I was wondering how long she had been carrying the accumulated tiredness of the cruise without letting it show. That was the care I could give her then: not medicine, not rescue, not even a particularly useful sandwich, but three uninterrupted hours in which nobody needed anything from her. I was included in nobody. The practical need had not disappeared, and I had not become magically independent because my wife closed her eyes. I had simply judged, as an adult and as her husband, that it could wait while she could not. Ellen woke a little after four and looked first at the curtains, then at me, then at the clock. I watched the facts arrange themselves behind her eyes. "You were supposed to wake me." I told her she had needed the sleep. "You were due at half past one." I knew. I had watched half past one arrive and deliberately allowed it to pass. Her hand went to the front of the bodysuit before she was fully sitting up. The check was as deliberate as an over-cotton check could be and less conclusive than she would have preferred, but it supplied enough information to remove alarm from her face. "Fuller than I would have left you," she said. I pointed out that it was not close to leaking. "No." The word cost her something. Ellen dislikes agreeing with a decision she did not make, especially when the decision concerns a schedule she did. "No, not close." I had laid out the mat and a fresh Pampers while she slept. She noticed that, and the untouched sandwiches, and the water beside the bed, and I saw her understand that I had not forgotten the routine or rejected it. I had held it for her. There is a difference, and because of what we had said at the Cape she was obliged to let the difference exist. She called it a dangerous precedent. I called it a contained exception. "One time," she said. I suggested we reserve judgment until the next time she needed three hours' sleep. She gave me a look that postponed the argument rather than conceding it, then stood, opened the zip and changed me. The fitting itself was ordinary, competent and perhaps a little more deliberate than usual, as if she were re-establishing the precision the afternoon had disturbed. When the fresh tapes were closed she pressed them flat and said, "For the record, you should have woken me." Afterward we ate the sandwiches at the desk while the ship continued to roll. The tea was indeed cold. Ellen drank it anyway and said nothing about the temperature, which was as close to gratitude as the circumstances required. Then we put the discard pile in a shallow box so it would not travel across the bed and played cards through the last of the bad weather, Ellen newly rested, me newly changed and both of us pretending the afternoon had not adjusted something small and useful between us. She won. This was not unusual, but she used it to argue that the three-hour nap had been a strategic delegation of operations rather than an accidental collapse of command. If you asked which of us had looked after the other that afternoon, the answer would depend on which hour you meant. She had dressed me in the morning and changed me after she woke. I had protected the sleep between those acts and carried the knowledge that I could wake her if waiting ceased to be sensible. Nothing reversed. Nothing needed to. The promise at North Cape had not made us equal by making us identical; it had left us enough room to be useful to each other in different ways on the same rough day. The storm eased enough for us to join Paul and Rita at the final dinner. Ellen arrived looking considerably more rested than she had at breakfast and denied that this proved anything. Paul said he had served in rougher seas, and Rita reminded him that he had never served at sea. "I crossed the Channel in 1989." "You complained before Dover." Marriage, around that table, was well represented. We had eaten together throughout the voyage and knew surprisingly little about one another in the formal sense. I could not have told you Paul's occupation before retirement without guessing, and Rita remained vague about which town they lived near, but we knew how Paul took his coffee, which foods Rita avoided, when her medication alarm sounded and the exact expression Ellen used when I reached for bread she had not allocated. A temporary society had formed over eight dinners, held together by table number and repeated habits, and that final evening its ending felt real. Paul proposed a toast to dry land. Rita corrected him. "To looking after each other," she said, raising her glass. "It isn't what you do around a marriage. It is the marriage." She did not look knowingly at me or turn the words into a private endorsement of anything she thought she had noticed. She included Paul, with his imaginary naval service, and Ellen, who had slept through lunch, and herself. We drank, exchanged addresses and promised to write. Paul and Rita have kept that promise with the methodical reliability of people who maintain both a Christmas-card list and a medication schedule. Across the lounge afterward we saw the man from the Geiranger coach and his wife dancing carefully and a little badly. When they noticed us, his wife raised one hand and Ellen waved back. A Christmas card arrived from them that winter with a photograph taken on another ship somewhere warm, the two of them still travelling. The sea had cleared by morning. We woke to the low industrial view of the disembarkation quay, luggage moving below and announcements beginning in the corridor, the ordinary machinery by which a holiday is returned to land. Our cases stood outside except for the supply bag and the things Ellen did not trust to strangers, a category broad enough to include passports, medication, binoculars and me. We tipped Ari with an envelope and thanked him for eight days of discretion and twice-daily bins. He accepted it, shook my hand and wished us a safe journey. He had treated us all week as ordinary guests with an ordinary need, and in doing so had given us exactly the service Ellen had asked for on the first afternoon. Then we went down the gangway and into the terminal, where the ordinary world resumed in luggage trolleys, shuttle signs and a queue for the airport hotel bus. Ellen kept the supply bag under her arm. The cruise was over. Her calculations were not.

Good for you although it's not my thing. Just be your authentic self.

98. My Nemesis The park had quite a lot of tracks that were open to cars, although you might not realise it. The place was quiet enough that most people paid it no attention unless they were jogging through on their way to somewhere else. Unlike the Imperial Park in Greater Ashfields, the old common in Palmerston, or just about every open space in Upper Ashfields, there was nowhere that the optimistic could stretch out in the hope of getting a tan. There were places that caught the sun, and a lot of perennial flower beds that seemed to always be bright and colourful even if they’d picked up a different crop of wildflowers since the last time a gardener had attended them; and there were open spaces where you might have a picnic, but they were sheltered by the orchard. It wasn’t anyone’s first choice for a place to enjoy the summer. I eased my truck along a narrow track between two lines of trees, and parked up. I didn’t stop the engine, though. I didn’t want Ffrances to know that I was idle, or she might wonder what my plans were. I was already finding it hard enough to have this little meeting, and I didn’t want to tell her about it as well. Mistress had a special way of praising me when I’d done something she approved of; and an unconditional apology probably qualified. And when she was praising me, telling me what a good girl I was, it was always so easy to tell the whole truth regardless of what I had intended to say. I leaned out of the car window and glanced in the direction of Pine Ridge Municipal Care Trust. I didn’t expect Ffrances would be looking back at me, but I knew she was there somewhere. A long, thin tendril of the park reached inside the walls, and formed a garden where recuperating patients could stroll, but that was all I knew about it. I’d never explored the wilderness gardens, and my experience of the hospital’s Japanese garden was limited to a single romp in a swing seat once when I’d been able to draw my girlfriend’s attention away from her office Christmas party a couple of years back. I turned to look down the path that lead to Raybridge instead. That was the important one. It saw a fair number of joggers, on their way to Palmerston or to Bullocksfeel, but there was nobody in sight at this time of the morning. It wasn’t the right weather for any but the most committed of joggers right now, and the flowerbeds were more like frost-topped forests of dead twigs. The park was even less appealing now that it would have been in summer. My phone chirped, and I glanced down. An old-fashioned text message, asking if I was here yet and apologising for the delay. I quickly answered with directions to where I was stopped – coming from the Pine Ridge entrance, apparently – and then glanced at another notification that would probably put me in a better mood. One of my favourite authors seemed happy today. TheAuthorsLittleSister had left a note saying that as well as the new chapter of The Baby Button this morning, she might be able to post another this evening. She put this down to her overbearing boss taking a day off work, giving Sister a chance to work on her magnum opus in every minute that wasn’t occupied by actual work. I replied to say that I was looking forward to finding out what happened to Leona, and that her boss should consider she’s lucky to have such a creative person in the office. Then I slunk back in my seat, reading the story while I waited for my meeting. I didn’t get to read half of the story before I heard a gentle tap on the window. I reached over and opened the passenger door, and did my best to present a calm smile. “Hey. Mind if we talk and drive?” I started. “I wanted to apologise properly, but it’s kind of chilly and the heater here doesn’t work so well when we’re not moving.” “I’ve not had breakfast,” he said with a shrug. “Could go to the volunteer café. Plenty warm there.” I thought about the offer for a second, then shook my head. PRMCT had a café that was run by volunteers, raising money for all kinds of non-medical stuff like painting murals on the walls of the children’s hospital. And the food there really was excellent, I knew that from experience. But I knew that Ffrances would be aware the moment my phone was anywhere near that building, and she would probably want to see me, and ask why I was there instead of at work. “I fancy a breakfast burrito,” I said, although I wasn’t that hungry. “Papa Roget’s? My treat.” He shrugged and gave a quick mutter of thanks, before climbing in beside me. We barely spoke on the way into Raybridge, but I could tell that he was slowly becoming more comfortable with my presence. That was a positive step, which I hoped would be the first of many. “You were coming from the hospital?” I asked in the end. “I hope it’s not something serious. An injury, or a family member?” I half suspected a family member in the psychiatric department, rather than the hospital. But I didn’t want to be making accusations. I wanted him to think I trusted him. There was a long pause, and I wondered if even the indirect question had been a little too much. “No,” he answered eventually. “Visiting a friend who works there. Adam, nice guy. He’s been teaching me a little self-defence. How to de-escalate if somebody’s intimidating me. Always a better option.” “I can’t argue with that.” I wondered if this kid might have a spark of honesty in him after all. That is, if I could assume that anything he said was even remotely true. Then we were at my second favourite taco shack of all time, and I knew that I would have to get out of the truck sooner or later. Better to get it over with; and hope that Ffrances wouldn’t be too cruel when it came to teasing me remotely. I turned back and pointed my remote at the truck, pressing the button once to turn the alarm on. As I did, I got a proper look at the kid for the first time since our original meeting. I’d seen him a couple of times since then, but I’d either been trying to stay out of sight or feigning disinterest in the visitor. Spike Luger was tall for his age. He had a good six inches over Tess, but he was at the same school as her, and everything I’d been able to find from other parents suggested that they were around the same age. It was hard to see him as a child, with a rangy, muscular form and the first signs of a beard that owed more to hope than to testosterone; but he was. And so I couldn’t judge him too harshly for preying on my little one. Still, he needed to know what he was getting himself into so that he wouldn’t wind up hurting her once they had grown closer. “I’m sorry,” I told him, once we were inside the restaurant and had placed an order for two of their famous breakfast burritos. “I think I misjudged you when we first met, and I didn’t stop to find out the facts.” The words were bitter in my mouth. It didn’t help that I knew I had to say them whether I believed them or not; it made the whole conversation feel disingenuous. “Thanks,” he said, and I have to believe he actually blushed then. A few seconds passed before he looked up again, and answered in more detail. “That means a lot, it really does. You don’t know me that well, but I’ve had people judging me based on… on my stepfather’s reputation for my whole life. It’s not a new thing, and I’ve done everything I can to draw a line between me and him. I’m not going to take after him, not if I can help it.” “What would daddy do?” I mumbled, reading the words on his little bracelet. He was fiddling with it now, and reading them himself, so I knew it was important to him. Even if I didn’t understand the sentiment. “What does that mean? Are you somebody’s ‘Daddy’?” “No. I’m too young for that. But to somebody who really knows me, I think you could see that I’m always asking myself what my Dad would have done. My real Dad, the one who ran into a burning building to save a neighbour’s kids. He’s everything that Duke isn’t, and when times are tough I like to imagine him looking over my shoulder. Ask myself if he would approve of what I’m doing. Am I being a person Dad would have been proud of? I hope so. And this is like a perfect reminder of that feeling. And a symbol of somebody I care about more than anything.” “That’s admirable,” I said, allowing myself a little smile. The answer was perfect, because it opened the door for me to say what I really needed to say. I couldn’t have planned this conversation better. “I’m glad you could share that with me now. I’ll admit, I was just a little worried the first time I saw that. Thinking it might mean… something else.” “I’m sorry?” “I mean…” I took a deep breath, and looked down at my hands. The same actions that came instinctively when I was apologising to my Mistress for some misunderstanding. “I’m sorry for the first time we met. I jumped to a conclusion, and I know now that I was wrong. I can tell that you’re sincere. I just… When I saw you standing beside Tess all protective, I thought it might have been you that was… well, you know?” “Don’t worry,” he answered quickly. “Nobody’s hurting her. I’m sure if she was upset about anything she’d tell me.” “I know. But there are either dangers. She hasn’t mentioned it?” “Mentioned what?” he seemed genuinely confused now, and I knew that I had him right where I wanted him. “There’s something she’s been keeping from me. Not because she’s scared, I don’t think anybody’s actually upsetting her. But she’s been… I don’t know. At first I thought that somebody was taking advantage of her desire to prove her maturity. That somebody was taking advantage of her. And you can see how it would be easy to suspect the guy she brings home, especially with ‘Daddy’ on his wrist. And I regret that now. But it means I don’t know now if this is something that she’s diving into for somebody else’s sake, or if it’s actually a part of who she is. Or who she’s growing into. A kind of… I guess you’d call it a fetish, but I don’t know she’s old enough to properly know what that means. You haven’t been trying to introduce her to that kind of thing, have you?” Of course he denied it. And as our food arrived, he pressed me for more details. If something was upsetting Tess, or if there was something confusing her, then of course he wanted to help. And thanks to my apology, the admission that I’d initially blamed him, it felt natural to share the details. I told him that Tess had shown some interest in being treated like a child again. That I’d given her the choice of a small spare room or a larger space that had been left decorated as a nursery by the people who had lived in my house before. I explained how she’d insisted on the nursery, and made weak excuses to avoid redecorating it in a more age-appropriate style. I mentioned that even when I had got a selection of new blinds for the windows, she had insisted on a childish one; all the time saying “if I have to” so she could maintain the pretence that this was something she was being pushed into against her will. I wanted to preserve some of my little girl’s privacy, but when this boy pushed I could see how much he really cared, so when he insisted on knowing everything I revealed that she had been wetting the bed, perhaps making herself an excuse to use the years-old diapers that she’d found in the drawers of the changing table. I mentioned that I’d seen her voting and following some “adult baby” pages on FriendSpace; a site that I knew she tended to minimise the importance of when interacting with her friends. Maybe the place on social media where she knew that others wouldn’t see what she was interested in. And I related how she had asked for a couple of days where we could treat her like a small child. How she had taken the slightest comment that could have been a tangential hint towards treating her like a child, and responded with “Well I guess it’s okay, if you insist” comments when nobody had even suggested the idea. I even told him that she’d left an advertising flyer lying around when the stash of diapers in her room ran low; an advertisement for the BKS website where the most babyish designs could be obtained in sizes to fit a growing girl. I let him know how worried we were about all of this, of course. That I’d been worried what kind of person would push a young girl to act like a baby, and to call him ‘Daddy’. I mentioned that I’d heard her mumble the word in her sleep, and my nightmares had been filled with images of some pervert convincing this little girl that he had her best interests at heart. He could understand, then, why I had been so harsh with the first friend she introduced me to. Why I’d found it so hard to trust Tess’s judgement in this matter. I told him that I no longer suspected that there was some guy in the shadows. That I hoped that this was her own nascent kink, even if she didn’t understand it in those terms and kept on acting like it was out of her control. Even if it worried me, that would be better. And Ffrances might have figured it out first; she was trying to discreetly teach me to accept that kind of thing. She wouldn’t say anything, of course, because she treated Tess as a patient. But Ffrances could leave books lying around that I might see, and perhaps help me to accept what Tess was feeling before she had the confidence to come out and mention it. I even described what had happened at Christmas. That Tess had wanted a way to experience the holiday like a child again, and had subtly hinted that she wanted to get presents. How she had quickly agreed that she was being “forced” to act like a baby, just from a single mention of the phrase “like a child on Christmas morning”. How we’d done our best to humour her, and she seemed so happy. And how she’d made no secret that she was disappointed we hadn’t made her mess her diapers like a baby; telling us that she never wanted to be that young, in a way that made it clear she thought we should have done. In the end, I asked him to promise not to tell Tess that I had shared all this. If she hadn’t told him about it, then she clearly wasn’t ready for him to see this side of her. I had just wanted to apologise, and I’d wanted him to understand why I had been so paranoid on our first meeting. But I hadn’t been able to explain without telling him more and more, and now I felt so guilty about breaking my little girl’s confidence. He promised to keep quiet, but I could see him thinking. He didn’t believe me, of course. But if he was the ‘Daddy’ he liked to see himself as, I knew he would have to investigate further. He would ask guarded questions, let her know that he was open to being her Daddy. And if she shared a half truth, anything that even hinted at our Christmas adventures, he would take that as confirmation. In his mind, she would want to be a baby. Maybe hearing it from a boy she liked would make her own inner childhood easier to accept. Maybe he would decide he wasn’t interested in her after all; or perhaps he would try to go along with her dreams and push too hard, until she couldn’t trust him close to her anymore. In any case, I thought as he set off back to his own home, either Tess would accept that she was a little, or Spike would be out of the picture. It was a win-win situation, where everyone could be happy in the end. Even when a sudden jolt of vibration from my underwear made it a conscious effort to avoid moaning aloud, I could feel pride in what I had achieved today.

Pampers diapers all the way!!!  They are the diapers that bring back so many memories of growing up.  I have purchased Huggies and Luvs over the years, but Pampers will always be my go to when I buy baby diapers.  There is something about the scent when I open a new package of Pampers diapers. Luvs had the same scent as well.  Unfortunately Luvs became extinct in Canada before they switched from plastic backed diapers.  I was not a Barney fan, but the Luvs diapers with Barney on the front were some of my favs.  I just hope Pampers keeps coming out with bigger sizes.