Rainbow Diapers

Alice hesitated for a moment and asked, "Are you wearing a pull-up, sis?" Maddison, who was gently stroking the little girl's hair, replied, "Yes, I am. Come on, little sister." Maddison picked her up and began explaining out loud, "Look, I won't need to wear a diaper except when I sleep; during the day, I'll alternate between pull-ups, training pants, and regular panties."

"I did not." Emily wined her face turning red with embarrassment as Alice giggled, "Awww baby sis did and so did I," Alice told Madison she then laid her head on her girlfriend's soft lap and heard the crinkle of the girlfriend's pull ups." 

Chapter 13: Tallinn's Grey Days By the time Aino reached the bus stop, the warmth of the apartment had already begun to feel strangely distant. Tallinn was grey that morning. The sky was grey, the pavement was grey, and the dirty remains of old snow along the roadside had achieved a shade that Aino suspected did not officially have a name. A cold wind followed her beneath the shelter, finding the narrow gap between her scarf and coat with unnecessary precision. She checked the time on her phone. Eight minutes until the bus. A message from Elisa was waiting for her. Elisa: Don't let them work you too hard. Dinner at six. ❤️ Aino smiled despite herself. Aino: I'll try. She considered adding a heart, spent several seconds deciding whether that would be too much, then remembered the previous night—the kissing, Elisa's hands beneath her shirt, the warmth of her body beside Aino's—and concluded that the heart threshold had probably been crossed some time ago. Aino: ❤️ She put her phone away. The bus arrived three minutes late. The Tallinn office occupied the third floor of a building that looked considerably more cheerful from the outside than it did from within. The reception area contained two grey chairs, a dying plant and a framed photograph of Tallinn's Old Town that seemed determined to remind everyone that there were prettier places nearby. The office itself was new. Aino knew that much already. The company had only recently established a proper presence in Tallinn, and judging by what she could see, presence was perhaps a generous word for it. Aino gave her name to the receptionist and was eventually collected by a man named Tarmo, who introduced himself as the local administrative manager. He shook her hand, welcomed her to Tallinn and asked whether she had found the office easily. They spoke Finnish, although Aino had to concentrate more than usual to follow him. Tarmo's Finnish was good enough for a conversation, but far from fluent. His sentences sometimes followed Estonian grammar, and every now and then an Estonian word appeared where a Finnish one should have been. Aino could usually work out what he meant from context. When Aino said that she had found the office easily, Tarmo nodded with satisfaction, as though they had successfully dealt with the most complicated part of Aino’s new job. He led her down a short corridor with several small offices. The place felt strangely unfinished, as though everyone had moved in before anybody had quite decided what to do with it. A few rooms were still empty. Aino counted only four other employees besides Tarmo, none of whom seemed particularly interested in finding out who she was. Her own workspace turned out to be a desk in a room shared with another employee, a woman wearing headphones who gave Aino a polite smile before returning to her screen. "This is yours," Tarmo said. The desk contained a monitor, keyboard, mouse and a telephone old enough that Aino briefly wondered whether it was decorative. "Okay." "And these are yours too." He pointed toward six cardboard archive boxes stacked against the wall beside the desk. Aino looked at them. "What are they?" "Old accounting material." Tarmo lifted the lid of the top box. Inside were folders stuffed with invoices, receipts and other documents, some neatly arranged and others apparently organized according to a system that had died with whoever invented it. "We're moving old records into the new system. These haven't been entered yet." Aino waited for him to continue, but apparently that was the explanation. "You want me to enter them?" "Yes." "Manually?" "Yes." Aino looked into the box again. There had to be hundreds of documents in that one alone, and five more boxes waited beneath it. Tarmo pulled over a chair and showed her the system. It wasn't difficult. Each invoice or receipt had to be opened, read and entered into the appropriate fields before the figures were checked against the original and the paper marked as processed. Aino watched him demonstrate the procedure twice before she was fairly certain she could have done it herself after the first. What interested her considerably more was the stack of paper. "Are these available digitally anywhere?" "Some probably are. Most aren't." "Do we have a scanner?" "At the end of the corridor, next to the printer." Aino looked at the boxes again, but this time with rather more interest. "If I scanned them first, I could probably automate most of this." Tarmo stopped with his hand on the mouse. "Automate it?" "Yes. The documents aren't all identical, but they're structured enough." Aino pulled one of the invoices closer and studied it. "I could write something to recognize the relevant information from the scans and put it into the correct fields. It wouldn't be perfect, obviously, but I could flag anything uncertain for review. That would still be much faster than entering everything by hand." She was already beginning to think about how she would do it. The invoices were messy enough to make the problem interesting, but not so messy that it seemed particularly difficult. Even the receipts could probably be handled reasonably well with a little— "No." Aino looked up. "No?" "These need to be entered manually." For a moment she assumed Tarmo hadn't understood what she meant. "I'd check anything the program wasn't confident about." "I understand." "Oh." Aino waited. Tarmo returned the invoice to the pile. "The instructions are to enter the material manually. No additional software, no scripts and no changes to the process." Aino frowned. "But why?" "That's the process." "Yes, but the process is inefficient." "I know." There was something about the calmness of his answer that bothered her more than disagreement would have. "If everyone knows it's inefficient, why don't we change it?" Tarmo gave her a look that was not unfriendly, but carried the weary patience of someone who had stopped asking similar questions a long time ago. "Those are the instructions from Helsinki." Aino's attention sharpened slightly. "From whom?" "I don't know." She wasn't entirely sure she believed him. Tarmo stood and pushed the chair back beneath the desk. "Start with the 2019 material. When you finish a box, let me know and I'll show you where the processed documents go." Aino glanced at the stack. "When I finish a box?" "Yes." He smiled politely and left. For a little while, Aino simply sat there. The computer hummed quietly in front of her. Somewhere farther down the corridor a printer started, stopped, and started again. The woman at the other desk continued typing without looking up. Aino reached into the first box and took out an invoice. The work was exactly as difficult as she had expected, which was to say not difficult at all. She read the document, entered the necessary information and checked it before placing the invoice in a new pile beside her keyboard. The second took slightly less time. By the fourth, she no longer needed to think about where anything went. Date, supplier, invoice number, amount, VAT. Check. Next. By the tenth document, Aino had improved the process as much as she was apparently permitted to improve it. She arranged the papers at a slight angle to the keyboard, learned the order of the fields by heart and worked through them with a rhythm that required almost none of the part of her brain she was accustomed to using at work. That, she discovered, was the worst thing about it. If the task had been difficult, she could at least have concentrated on doing it well. If it had contained some complicated problem, she could have lost herself in solving it. Instead, the solution to the only interesting problem in the room was sitting fully formed in her head, and she had specifically been told not to use it. She finished another receipt and reached for the next. Then she glanced at the clock. 9:14. Aino stared at it for a moment. She had been working for fourteen minutes. "Oh dear," she whispered. The next time Aino looked at the clock, it was 9:37. This was not encouraging. She tried to stop checking after that. Instead, she concentrated on the papers and discovered that if she worked quickly enough, she could sometimes disappear into the rhythm of the task for several minutes at a time. It wasn't interesting, exactly, but there was at least a small satisfaction in watching the unfinished pile shrink while the processed one grew. Unfortunately, the boxes appeared to contain considerably more paper than their dimensions should reasonably have allowed. By eleven, Aino had also begun to notice the air. The office had smelled slightly stale when she arrived, but she had assumed that was simply what happened when several people spent their winter days inside a building with all the windows closed. Now her nose was becoming increasingly blocked, and there was an irritating tickle at the corners of her eyes. She rubbed one of them and continued typing. A few minutes later, she rubbed it again. "Do your eyes get irritated in here?" The question was directed at the woman sitting across from her, who removed one side of her headphones. "Sorry?" "My eyes." Aino pointed at them, then immediately felt foolish for doing so. "They're itchy." The woman considered this. "Sometimes." "Oh." "You get used to it." That wasn't quite the answer Aino had hoped for. "Is there something wrong with the ventilation?" The woman shrugged. "Probably." Then she put her headphone back on. Aino stared at her for a moment before returning to the invoice on her screen. Apparently this, too, was simply how things were done in Tallinn. By lunchtime, breathing through her nose had become inconvenient enough that she had started doing it through her mouth instead. She ate the sandwich she had brought with her in a small break room, where two of the other employees were speaking Estonian too quickly for her to follow. One of them briefly tried to include Aino in the conversation by switching to Finnish. Somebody had left a handwritten note on the microwave that Aino could only partly understand. Nobody made much effort to continue the conversation with her. She sent Elisa a message instead. Aino: The office is awful. The reply arrived almost immediately. Elisa: That bad? Aino considered how much complaining was reasonable after less than four hours. Aino: I have entered 143 old invoices and receipts into a system by hand. I suggested automating it and was told I'm not allowed to. Also I think the building is trying to kill me. Three dots appeared. Elisa: Should I be worried about that last part? Aino: My nose is blocked and my eyes itch. Elisa: That sounds lovely. Aino: Tarmo says welcome to Tallinn. There was a slightly longer pause before Elisa replied. Elisa: Come home after work. I'll feed you. Aino smiled. Aino: You were going to do that anyway. Elisa: Yes, but now you get extra dessert. ❤️ That helped more than Aino wanted to admit. The afternoon did not. By three, her eyes felt gritty and sore, her nose was completely blocked and the air in the room seemed to have acquired weight. She went outside during a short break and stood in the cold for several minutes simply because breathing suddenly felt pleasant again. The relief was noticeable enough that she briefly considered whether returning upstairs was actually necessary. It was. There were still five boxes. Aino went back inside. When she finally opened the apartment door that evening, the smell of food reached her before Elisa did. "Hi," Elisa called from the kitchenette. "Perfect timing." Aino closed the door rather harder than she intended. Elisa appeared in the hallway holding a wooden spoon. "That good?" "No." Aino pulled off her scarf. "How was your first day?" "Stupid." Elisa raised an eyebrow. "The work is stupid, the system is stupid, the office is stupid, and Tarmo is stupid." "Who's Tarmo?" "My boss. Sort of. I don't know. He's stupid." Elisa wisely chose not to defend a man she had never met. Aino struggled with one sleeve of her coat, became inexplicably angry at it and yanked her arm free. "And the building smells." "I thought you said it was trying to kill you." "It is." "Right." "My eyes have been itching all day, I can't breathe through my nose, and when I asked about the ventilation, someone told me I'd get used to it." "That's not very reassuring." "No, Elisa, it isn't." The words came out much more sharply than Aino intended. There was a brief silence. Elisa put the wooden spoon down on the counter. Aino knew almost immediately that she had been unfair, which somehow made her feel worse. "I know it isn't," Elisa said. "I didn't mean—" "It's all right." "No, it isn't." Aino dropped her bag beside the wall and rubbed both hands over her face. Her eyes were itching again. Everything was itching. Her clothes felt uncomfortable, her head hurt, the apartment was too warm after the cold outside, and now Elisa was being patient with her, which was almost unbearably irritating because it meant Aino couldn't even be properly angry with her. "I hate it there." The anger disappeared from the sentence halfway through. Elisa's expression changed. "Come here." "I don't want to." "All right." That was somehow the wrong answer too. Aino stood in the hallway for several seconds, miserable and furious without being entirely certain what she wanted Elisa to do about either of those things. Then she walked over to her. Elisa opened her arms without comment. Aino pressed herself against her and buried her face against Elisa's shoulder. "There we are," Elisa murmured. "Don't." "Don't what?" "I don't know." Elisa's hand moved slowly up and down her back. Aino allowed this for perhaps ten seconds before muttering, "You can keep doing that." "I was planning to." "Okay." The apartment became quiet around them. Elisa didn't ask any more questions, and gradually Aino became aware of things other than the pressure behind her eyes and the horrible office and the six cardboard boxes. Elisa's shirt was soft against her cheek. Her hand moved in the same slow path along Aino's back, again and again, without asking anything in return. Aino's shoulders began to loosen. "Tarmo really is stupid," she said eventually. "I'm sure he is." "You don't even know him." "I'm taking your word for it." Aino gave a tired little laugh. "Better?" Elisa asked. "A little." "Good. Dinner can wait." Aino didn't argue. Elisa led her to the sofa, and Aino curled against her almost immediately, resting her head in Elisa's lap. She closed her eyes as Elisa ran her fingers gently through her hair and scratched lightly at her scalp. For several minutes, neither of them spoke. This was different from the night before. Aino wasn't little, exactly. She didn't want her pacifier or her toys, and she wasn't looking for that particular soft place inside herself. She was simply exhausted and wanted someone else to take care of her for a while. Apparently Elisa was quite willing to volunteer. "Your eyes are red," she said after a while. "They feel horrible." "We should see how you feel tomorrow morning. If it happens again when you go back there, I'd take it seriously." Aino made a noncommittal sound and pushed her face more firmly against Elisa's stomach. Elisa continued stroking her hair. After a while, Aino shifted uncomfortably. "What?" Elisa asked. "Nothing." "That looked like something." Aino hesitated. Her diaper was already wet, and normally Aino would have changed it as soon as she got home. At the moment, however, getting up from Elisa's lap seemed like an unreasonable demand. "I need a change." "All right." Aino didn't move. Elisa waited. After a few seconds, Aino opened one eye. "What?" "You said you need a change." "I know." "And yet here you remain." "I'm tired." "So I've noticed." Aino closed her eye again, apparently considering the matter settled. Elisa's fingers moved through her hair once more before stopping. "Would you like me to help you?" Aino opened both eyes this time. The question shouldn't have surprised her. Elisa had changed her once before, the morning after the board meeting, when Aino had been in no state to manage much of anything herself. But that had been different. Everything about that morning had been different. Now Elisa was simply looking down at her and waiting. Aino felt a small flicker of embarrassment. "Would you mind?" "No." "Really?" "Aino." "Right. Sorry." Elisa smiled and ruffled her hair. "Come on." In the bedroom, Aino fetched what they needed while Elisa cleared a space on the bed. There was still a moment of awkwardness when Aino lay down, not because Elisa hadn't seen her in a diaper before, but because choosing to let Elisa take care of her felt different from needing her help in an emergency. Elisa seemed to understand that without needing it explained. "Comfortable?" she asked. Aino nodded. Elisa smiled and brushed a strand of hair away from her face before beginning. She didn't tease her or make a ceremony of it. She simply helped her out of the wet diaper, cleaned her gently, and slid the fresh diaper into place beneath her. Aino heard the familiar crinkle as Elisa pulled it up between her legs, the soft rustle of plastic and padding settling around her hips. Elisa took her time, running her fingers along the waistband to make sure it sat comfortably, then pressing the tapes down one by one with quiet, deliberate care. There was nothing awkward about it. Elisa didn't pause or hesitate, didn't treat Aino as though this were something embarrassing that needed to be carefully ignored. She simply did what needed to be done, as naturally as if she were helping Aino into a coat or wrapping a scarf around her neck. Somehow, that was better than any reassurance could have been. Elisa wasn't merely accepting this part of her. She was making room for it in their life together, as though it belonged there. Aino watched her for a while. There was something unexpectedly comforting about lying there and letting Elisa take care of her. After the entire day had been filled with irritating little demands—another receipt, another field, another number to check—it felt good not to have to do anything at all. When Elisa finished, she smoothed Aino's pajama top back down and rested her hand briefly on her stomach. "There. Better?" "Much." Aino reached for her hand before Elisa could move away. "Thank you." Elisa squeezed her fingers. "Any time." Aino smiled. Elisa leaned down and kissed her forehead. "Now I feed you." The days passed more quickly than they should have. Every morning Aino left the apartment while Elisa was still there, and every morning the same six boxes—or what felt suspiciously like the same six boxes—waited beside her desk. She entered invoices and receipts until dates, supplier names and VAT amounts began following her into her thoughts even after she had closed the office door behind her. She hadn't even thought about the strange phone call she'd overheard from Juhani in days. Between the mind-numbing work and everything that was happening with Elisa, it had simply slipped into the back of her mind. The air didn't improve either. By late morning her nose would usually be blocked, and by afternoon her eyes would be itching badly enough that she had to make a conscious effort not to rub them. Going outside during lunch helped, but only until she returned upstairs. Tarmo remained perfectly polite and almost entirely useless. On the second day, Aino asked him whether she could at least use a spreadsheet to speed up part of the work. "No." On the third, she didn't ask. The evenings were better. Sometimes Elisa cooked, sometimes Aino insisted on doing it herself, and once they ordered far too much Chinese food because neither of them felt like doing anything more complicated than opening the door. They watched television, talked, kissed on the sofa and went to bed together. Aino occasionally brought out Bunny and her pacifier when she wanted to be little, and Elisa accepted those evenings with the same easy affection she had shown the first time. For a few hours each night, Tallinn almost became bearable. That was perhaps why Sunday arrived too quickly. Elisa's winter holiday was over. She had work in Helsinki on Monday morning, and although they had both known from the beginning that she would have to leave, Aino had managed remarkably well not to think about it until Elisa's suitcase was standing by the apartment door. "You have everything?" Aino asked. "I think so." "Phone charger?" "Yes." "Work laptop?" "Yes." "Toothbrush?" Elisa smiled. "Yes." Aino looked around the apartment, searching for something else Elisa might conceivably have forgotten. "Aino." "What?" "Come here." Aino went to her. Elisa wrapped her arms around her, and Aino held on more tightly than she had intended. "It's only Helsinki," Elisa murmured. "I'm not disappearing." "I know." "We'll call." "Every day?" "If you want." Aino pulled back enough to look at her. "I want." "Then every day." "Okay." Elisa kissed her, softly at first. Aino put her arms around her neck and kissed her again, lingering this time, already painfully aware that there wouldn't be another kiss waiting for her when she came home that evening. When they separated, Elisa brushed her thumb beneath Aino's eye. "Hey." "I'm fine." "You're crying." "That doesn't mean I'm not fine." Elisa smiled sadly. "I suppose not." Aino wiped at her eyes, but more tears came anyway. "I don't want you to go." "I know." For a moment Elisa looked as though she might say something reassuring, but instead she simply pulled Aino against her again and held her. Aino preferred that. Eventually Elisa had to let go. She picked up her suitcase, kissed Aino once more and opened the door. "I'll call you tonight." "Promise?" "I promise." Then she was gone. Aino stood in the hallway listening to the wheels of Elisa's suitcase disappear down the corridor. A few seconds later came the distant sound of the lift doors closing. She went back inside. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had five minutes earlier. It didn't feel the same at all.

I have a question, is her name Betsy or Betsy? Just curious  Besty 

I'm in a similar situation. However, when I sit there is a bit of a flop. I'd like a flat tummy to tape a diaper all up, maybe one day.