2011

Disposable diapers don’t work, at least not with me, as I sleep on my side as well. In bed I wear nothing but cloth diapers since then leaks are at a minimum. The way I see it cloth diapers provide 360 degrees of absorbency. Wearing disposables can be an option but I would always put a thin cloth diaper over it and some snug fitting plastic pants just to be sure.  

I hear you on this.  But as people often point out. This is a choice. I dont need them physically. However I do need them mentally and emotionally. There is a physical aspect to it, as in I feel more comfortable in a nappy than I do in regular underwear. But that's as far as the physical need goes. Therefore I can prioritize. Believe me whilst I was 247. Many many times I didnt want anything more than wanting to be able to say I need my nappies because im "incontinent" now. But it turns out my body and mind are more stubborn than what i thought.  Something i havent shared with everyone is that im currently studying and going to be changing careers. Ill be changing to the food and beverage industry. It will also allow me to travel. So at this point, as much as I want to be 247, I need to consider my future and how nappies would fit into it. Because there is so much of the unknown, I dont want something that is a choice to hinder my future career. Possibly once im in the industry and see how it all works and im confident that wearing nappies 247 wont impact my career. I will start wearing 247.  So at this point. I now know 247 is possible. I can live that lifestyle and still be able to stop 247 and still be in full control physically. I am also aware that should I start wearing 247 again for a length of time there is a possibility that I could loss control at any point.     

@SpiderBaby what is your thoughts of this post.  Start from page 1 and work your way. Ack then comment.     I believe your obsession with Nappies is a lot.   i wish I could have that many and more.

Chapter 20 — Tromsø, and a Day Apart Tromsø was the port where Ellen and I spent a whole day apart, by choice, the way couples do when they have been married long enough to stop treating identical interests as proof of love. It was the right day for it, coming after the library and the Circle and the gala, three events in one long northern stretch during which we had negotiated our marriage, drenched me in Arctic water and introduced a zip I could not reach. By morning we were ready for separate itineraries. It was also my birthday. I turned fifty-five, which is the sort of age that looks significant only because the digits match, and I have never made much of birthdays even when the arithmetic offers an excuse. I dislike the song, the gathering, the pause while everybody watches you open something, and especially the moment when a waiter approaches carrying a dessert with a sparkler and the expression of a man about to violate your privacy on behalf of the hospitality industry. Ellen knows this. We had agreed on a quiet day and dinner with Paul and Rita, who could be trusted to keep the fuss within tolerable limits. She gave me my first present at breakfast, properly wrapped despite my views on being watched, and inside was a pair of binoculars, good ones, heavy and precise in the hand. "For today," she said, "and the rest of the trip, and the next one. I'm tired of you asking me what that is on the far shore." I pointed out that she usually had no idea either. They were exactly right. I put the strap around my neck before we left the table. Ellen adjusted it by one notch because apparently even presents arrived under management. Back in the cabin she locked the door and said, "Potty time first." It was the next new phrase, tried under the rule we had written the previous morning: in private, one at a time, and gone if I said no. The heat reached my face, though less violently than it once would have, and Ellen waited without repeating it. She waited outside the bathroom as she always had, and when I was finished she brought out the supplies for the day. The product was thick enough for the hours ashore, and over it went the back-zip bodysuit from the night before. There was no surprise this time. I stepped into it, put my arms through and turned, and Ellen drew the zip to its unreachable finish between my shoulders. "Long day," she said, smoothing the cotton over my waist. "No experiments." I told her I considered the previous experiment fully peer-reviewed. "Good. Get dressed." We walked down a perfectly steady gangway, took the short shuttle toward the centre and separated near the harbour. Ellen wanted the cable car, the Arctic Cathedral and as much museum as could be fitted around both. I wanted boats, a beer and the freedom to enter a bookshop without somebody asking whether I intended to buy another book before I had read the ones at home. We agreed to meet at four at a café she had marked on the map. "Phone on," she said. I assured her the binoculars were with me. "Those are not a phone." There are limits to how far marriage can adapt to a man's sense of humour. She kissed me, checked the time and walked toward her bus. I began along the harbour without any purpose more ambitious than seeing what was tied up there. Fishing boats sat low and workmanlike beside excursion vessels with photographs of whales on their sides, and across Tromsøysundet the Arctic Cathedral rose white against the green slope beyond it. Through the binoculars the city rearranged itself into small discoveries: rust at the waterline of a red hull, two men coiling rope on a deck I could barely see with the naked eye, windows scattered across the mountain like pieces of reflected sky. Near the end of a quay I found three people looking upward with the absorbed stillness that marks either birdwatchers or witnesses to a minor structural emergency. I followed their gaze and saw nothing until a man beside me, Norwegian by his accent and equipped with binoculars considerably more serious than mine, pointed above the roofs. A large dark bird turned once in the wind, showed a pale tail and moved out over the water. "Sea eagle," he said. I found it in the glass just before it passed behind a building, then caught it again over the sound, the wings held almost still while the town and the harbour worked below. The man told me where a pair sometimes nested farther up the coast and asked whether I was on the cruise ship. We spoke for ten minutes about the route north, the weather at the Cape and the unreliability of birds that appear immediately for a man with new binoculars and then encourage him to spend the rest of his life expecting the same service. I walked farther than I had planned because the eagle had gone that way, though it did not reappear. That did not matter. The binoculars kept giving me reasons to stop, and stopping gave people reasons to speak. A woman from our ship asked what I had seen. An excursion guide pointed out an old wooden vessel being restored beyond the bridge. By noon I had acquired several facts of uncertain accuracy and the pleasant sense that the harbour was a place I had visited rather than scenery I had passed. Sophie called while I was sitting on a bench near the water. She wished me happy birthday, accused her mother of spoiling me and then, after the family preliminaries, asked whether I had five minutes because she had been offered the lead on a project at work and had spent the morning inventing reasons she was not ready for it. Her job remains one none of us can explain, including Sophie on some days, but uncertainty sounds much the same in every profession. I asked whether she wanted the role. She said she thought so. I asked whether the people offering it knew how old she was and how long she had worked there. "Obviously." Then they possessed the relevant facts, I told her, and she should not reject herself on their behalf. She was quiet for a moment. "That's annoyingly sensible, Dad." It was the nicest thing any of my children had said to me that week. She asked what I was doing. I told her I was watching boats in Tromsø with the binoculars her mother had given me and had already seen a sea eagle, which was an excellent return on the first hour of ownership. I sent her a photograph of the harbour, received three cake symbols and a promise to call after the trip. I found fish soup, bread and a local beer at a place with outdoor tables sheltered from the wind. The bodysuit remained close beneath my clothes, the zip present when I leaned back and otherwise no more central to the afternoon than the belt around my waist. Ellen had made the practical arrangements. I was making a day. Around two my phone buzzed with a message from Ellen: Photo please. Front and back. E. I found a private cubicle, untucked my shirt and sent the two mirror photographs she wanted, smooth white cotton at the front and the closed zip at the back. Her answer arrived before I had finished tucking everything away: All good. Good boy. Enjoy your beer. I did. I also opened Thomas's birthday message, which read happy birthday old man. enjoy the fjords. T, a degree of warmth that from Thomas approaches public display. Daniel had gone further. He had sent a photograph of a card showing an elderly man in a diaper of heroic proportions, with the suggestion Found Dad's next birthday present. I forwarded it to Ellen as Daniel's proposed upgrade, and her answer arrived a few minutes later: Not suitable for travel. Poor leg gathers. Also ugly. I laughed aloud, because to Daniel this would look like his mother entering a birthday joke with unnecessarily firm opinions, while to me it was a considered product assessment from the woman who had dressed me that morning and had since required photographic evidence that everything remained properly arranged. I sent him only her verdict: Your mother has vetoed it. He replied, I was joking. Ellen, I knew, had not been, and I ordered my second beer and left our son safely convinced that all three of us were laughing at the same thing. At a quarter to four I reached the café Ellen had chosen and found the chairs stacked behind the glass and a handwritten notice on the door. My Norwegian was not equal to the details, but the lock supplied the central argument. There had been a time when a failed plan involving Ellen would have felt like the beginning of a larger failure, because she was the plan and I had made myself dependent on its smooth operation. That afternoon it was only a closed café. There was a bakery across the square with coffee, tables and a sign large enough to identify in a photograph. I sent Ellen the picture and the message: Original closed. Across the square, blue awning. Table at the back. She replied with a thumbs-up from the cable car queue. I ordered for both of us, put the binoculars on the spare chair so she would see me through the window, and watched people negotiate the same locked door before reaching the same conclusion. Ellen arrived twelve minutes after four, wind-reddened and carrying enough museum information for a lecture series. She saw the coffee waiting and the closed café opposite. "Competent," she said, which is not a word she wastes. When I stood to kiss her, her hand rested briefly at the back of my trousers, an ordinary wife's affectionate pat to anybody watching and a quiet confirmation to us. "Everything all right?" she asked. I said it was. Over coffee she told me about the view from Storsteinen, the cable car queue and an exhibition on polar expeditions that had confirmed her belief that most historical disasters began with inadequate provisioning. I told her about the sea eagle, the boat being restored and Sophie's project. The point of the day apart was not that we had remained connected every minute. It was that we had returned carrying different things. We went back by shuttle and walked up the gangway together. The back-zip garment had done what Ellen intended, but it was not the day's subject when I remembered Tromsø later. The eagle was, and Sophie asking my advice, and Ellen calling a replacement café competent. The care had made the day possible and then, for several useful hours, moved into the background. In the cabin before dinner, Ellen took my phone and looked at Daniel's card again, this time with me beside her rather than through messages sent across Tromsø. "I stand by my assessment," she said. I asked whether she had spent the afternoon reconsidering the leg gathers. "No. I happen to have a comparison." She set the phone face-up on the dressing table and brought out my second present, one she had carried in the bottom of her case. It came in a plain bag, and inside was a pack of diapers printed with a soft, ridiculous pattern instead of the usual medical white. I looked from the elderly man on the screen to the pattern in Ellen's hands and then to Ellen herself, and found the particular dryness around her mouth that means she has been waiting some time for a private joke to arrive. Daniel's timing, unlike his product recommendation, could not have been improved. "A frivolous purchase," she said. "Patterned Pampers for my husband's birthday. Nobody will see them but me." The binoculars had turned me toward the world; the patterned Pampers belonged entirely to the part of our life that faced inward. I could have made a larger theory of the two gifts, and in earlier chapters probably would have, but the theory was already sitting there in my hands. Ellen wanted me out seeing everything. She also wanted this private part of me in her care. Neither gift cancelled the other. I thanked her for both. "Happy birthday, my love," she said, kissing me. "Now let's get you sorted for dinner." She unzipped the bodysuit and changed me out of the thick plain Pampers I had worn all day. Then she opened the birthday pack and fitted the patterned one, smoothing it into place with an attention the print did not strictly require. "There," she said, giving the covered front a final pat. "Birthday pair for the birthday boy." At dinner there was a small cake without a sparkler. Rita sang half of the first line before Paul stopped her on humanitarian grounds, and the four of us drank to fifty-five, the North Cape and adequate provisioning. Nobody knew what I wore beneath my dinner clothes except Ellen, who glanced at me once over her wine with the private amusement of a woman enjoying her own gift. That night the captain announced a clear forecast for the North Cape. A small cheer travelled through the ship, because many people make the journey and see only cloud, and we were promised the midnight sun at the top of the world. I went to bed with one birthday gift against my skin and the binoculars hanging beside the cabin door, ready for the view that waited tomorrow.

Geez @DailyDi you come up with some weird but cool post.