oznl

Nice analogy. I'm a serial-offender for over-analysing Bambi. I often wonder how much quicker "progress" could have been/would be if I could stop doing that. Still, it happens regularly enough now although still not every night. You should receive some kind of award for this! I can remember when I started out. I had to travel for business very frequently (pretty much every other week) and just 2 - 4 days of nappies largely deleted my luggage space. I've discovered that heat makes a big difference to how "wet" I will be. In my climate, the vast majority of the year ranges between warm and hot. "Winter" (such as it is) here is really only 6 - 8 weeks long and even then, daytime temps are usually between 20C and 25C but the nights are crisp. I actually tend to wear heavier day-nappies during winter. My at-home Active Airs may not run the distance. Interesting. There's a chance I might need to take a trip (my first since the pandemic) and if I do, it's likely to be a couple of weeks and managing my bedwetting will be a challenge. Did you re-use dry night nappies (so you could carry a smaller number) or how did you manage this? Did you end up reverting to bedwetting whilst still away or was the week #2 at your return home? This might give me some clues how to navigate here. In my case, this is due to a US-centric browser-side spell checker that hasn't responded to my (desultory) attempts to install a localised English dictionary.

🤣 - Seriously though, surely that would have to be pretty uncomfortable once that pee starts to chill down in there. You really *would* be wet down to your ankles for anything more than a few dribbles. It really does seem like a terrible idea. At least THESE ones aren't sold as day-wear: https://www.pjama.com.au/collections/adult AND they feature some kind of ankle-seal to stop the otherwise-inevitable fall-out...

Wow, THAT would have been an interesting conversation to start with a therapist! Did you have that story told in a thread somewhere? I'd be fascinated to read it. I suspect my beloved would like very much for me to visit a therapist but the objective would be to "cure" me...

And THIS is the truly maddening thing about this silly game. If you stop to count your chickens, the chickens go away... Ironically, if you decide move on with life and do something else: within a few nights you get chickens because, well because you weren't thinking about them. This maps into the kind of trap whereby if you plan to bed-wet you won't but if you go to bed without a nappy at some point, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week you wake up in cold wet sheets because you weren't thinking about it. This is where @Little Sherri and I find ourselves today. We know we will be dry some nights but we don't know which ones and the wet nights will be the ones when we're not thinking about it. This leaves our night nappies as effectively compulsory attire. It is a measure of the strangeness of our affliction that neither of us seem at all bothered by this 🤣

My experience has been that if once bedwetting starts to occur, you make no effort to interfere with it (ie: change behaviours either to avoid it or to test or monitor it) then yes, it will slowly progress. Having said that, some people never get to the "starts to occur" phase. Others, once it does occur, then (sometimes unintentionally) beat it back into retreat by over-thinking it (I did this for a while). It's an interesting question about the "point of no return". My experience once that I'd had ANY unplanned bedwetting incident, it was impossible for me to call out what I should or should not do to avoid it. It just happens. My experience is that it's not respecter of time or place. I don't "wet the bed" every night but it happens often enough and doesn't stop for nights in hotel or friends beds. If it's going to happen, it happens. For this reason, even though I still have "dry" nights, I MUST wear nappies to bed. I can't take the risk. It probably took 1 year of 24/7 to get to that point although actual bedwetting events remained rare. After 6.5 years, bed wetting still isn't every night but it's quite common now - alcohol nearly guarantees it.

Last Sunday night had been a “cloth” night. Old school: A kite-folded-and-pinned 60” x 60” terry towel nappy covered by opaque white plastic pants with just a compression pant over that so I could walk around the house with underwear that could laugh at gravity before bed. A “cookie monster” t-shirt that my kids had given me years ago as a laugh (very little can stand in the way between me and a packet of biscuits) completed my ensemble. I probably looked a little more “AB” than “DL” but this was more by accident than design. I’d gone to bed seven hours earlier with a warm wet spot at my crotch but in all probability, 80% dry. Waking in Monday-winter-dawn gloom, I noticed that my nappy was warm and wet all around me. Cloth nappies are like that. There’s no “stay dry” technology in cloth nappies whatsoever. When you pee in them, you feel wet. It’s not uncomfortable-wet though. It’s warm, snug and humid against your skin, like a wet-suit kind of wet whilst hopefully all outside of them remains dry. Rolling over in bed, I realised my nappy also felt, well heavy. Reaching behind I slipped a finger under the waist elastic of my plastic pants at the small of my back only to discover sodden terry towelling. If I was soggy up there, I was probably soaked. Clearly the bedwetting fairies had visited during the night. I couldn’t recall any kind of pee dream. I couldn’t recall anything really. I’d slept through the lot. The terry towelling had done its usual superb job of wicking pee evenly throughout the garment leaving me equitably damp across all of my nappy zone. This is in stark contrast to even high-end disposable nappies that have an unfortunate tendency to soak, swell and leak around the “ground zero” area leaving a goodly portion of that expensive SAP elsewhere in the garment with little to do. Still, I was warm, snug, empty-bladdered and had no particular reason to get up. This was one of those moments where I swear that even vanilla people could find a kind of decadent comfort in a well-fitted night nappy if only they could get past their psychological prejudices. It was at this point (0700 according to my bedside clock-radio) that the local council foliage-nazis fired up a battalion of leaf blowers in order to march down our short cul-de-sac ruthlessly blasting the few dozen fallen leaves one meter to the left of where they’d dropped. This apparently justifies the “beautification levy” imposed upon us by them whilst helping those same good citizens avoid the moral turpitude of sleeping in on a weekday. As the sound of several angry robot-mosquito-noise leaf blowers penetrated the dim gloom of our bedroom, the rising sun did its part: a sudden beam of pure, 6500K sunlight (I didn’t count them but say at about 126 million lumens) blasted in through our ensuite window, straight past the door that my beloved had forgotten to close when she’d left for the gym an hour earlier to roast my eyeballs at the exact spot where I’d left them on my pillow. Closing my eyes reduced the brightness just a bit. Like a brick landing in a crystal cabinet, morning had broken… I lay there for a few more minutes trying to pretend that I could doze despite the roar of garden equipment and the probability of getting sunburned in bed. Perhaps if I could just get up and shut the ensuite door. At least it would be darker in here. Sighing, I hauled myself up out of bed and padded damply across cold floor tiles to close the ensuite door. Just then, one of the leaf blowers howled a crescendo from somewhere startlingly close to our street-facing bedroom window: an anguished, Mechanoid cry as if it were aware of the Sisyphean futility of its own existence. Perhaps if I shut the window facing the street. Never mind that I was clad only in a Sesame Street t-shirt, saggy wet nappy and plastic pants. Window-ward I strode. Arriving there, I opened the plantation shutter to close the glass behind it only for a dusty fog of leaf-blower-raised pollen and debris wash over me. The hay-fever attack was instant. Fun fact: sometimes now when I sneeze, I wet myself a bit. Good thing I wear nappies I suppose. Several minutes and half a box of tissues later with an even-wetter night nappy, the hay-fever settled down and I looked longingly back at my bed. Perhaps I could STILL somehow achieve a sneaky brief doze. I clambered back in and as I pulled the doona back up over myself, hoping to recover some of the toasty warmth I’d been enjoying 10 minutes earlier, I felt the cool lower sheet against my bare thigh below my plastic pants. It felt very cool. And a bit wet. I’d evidently leaked a little. As everything around me was body temperature when I awoke, I couldn’t tell but a few minutes uncovered to the crisp winter morning air had chilled the damp spot of bedding down nicely. It was only a small wet patch with a diameter no more than a coffee cup but I was acutely aware that there was plenty more pee from where that came. The overwhelming likelihood was that a plastic pant leg elastic had ridden up during my tossing and turning allowing a small amount of damp terry towel to touch the sheet but it was also possible that I was by now too soaked for this nappy. A certain quantity of beer had been imbibed the previous evening. It was time to give up and carpe the Diem. Standing in our ensuite removing pins, the whole nappy and plastic pants affair slid down my legs to thud wetly on the shower floor. Still, it had been a spectacularly comfortable night nappy and I mourned its passing.

He doesn't look, well, committed...

Welcome to Australian pricing where a case of Rearz will set you back around USD110. That's the "everyday" price and there are no sales, ever...

I'm starting to experience some difficulties in peeing myself sometimes. I will get my PSA checked at my next checkup but I do wonder if I've managed to give myself some kind of voiding dysfunction with all of this. I totally don’t understand this myself. The bedwetting fairies visit me regularly, although not every night. On those nights where the bedwetting fairies have stayed away, the act of peeing myself (which I must do 2 – 3 times per night just to remain comfortable now) seems so “deliberate” that it’s a mystery how it happens whilst I’m asleep sometimes. It MUST be some kind of mental “decision” that’s going on to do that (evidenced by the fact that I’ll often “wet the bed” within 2 hours of falling asleep with a 100% empty bladder so it’s not like I truly needed to go) but it’s far enough down the thought totem-pole not to intrude on sleep anymore. I soaked my 60" x 60" pinned terry nappy last night (which takes a LOT of pee to do) and I've not the slightest idea when that happened. I was only slightly damp at the front when I went to bed. Have you tried exhaling breath and leaving your lungs empty for 10 to 20 seconds or so? It’s a trick that “shy bladder” sufferers sometimes use. If I do it these days, I will wet myself involuntarily with whatever is in my bladder even if I thought my bladder was already empty. I feel the pelvic drop and shortly after that, I feel pee.

Should be in the freezer, not the pantry...

This week I was responding to a question somebody had with respect to the side effects of dependency that might arise with prolonged nappy use. Bizarrely, I find myself now with life skills that qualify me to tackle this sort of niche question with the kind of professorial discourse that could, with perilous ease, be mistaken for intelligence. Top tip: a life hack for looking smart is to know something of a topic sufficiently obscure that most will (probably for the best) know nothing of at all. I believe that the chair for people who push popcorn up their nose is still vacant. Anyway, back to the topic. it wasn’t a detailed answer. People don’t read detailed answers anyway these days. If they did, a lot of dumb stuff that happens in the world might not happen. I’m more inclined for detailed posts here on my own chronicle because it’s written for me but when answering others, I do try to be more succinct. And once more, back to the topic. My favourite trick for constructing short replies that don’t skimp on meaning is to build a visual/verbal metaphor that can cover a lot of information territory in a relatively small number of syllables. I was trying to convey the point that despite 6.5 years of nappies, I was still somewhat continent but there are some limits. I described myself as having a “toddler bladder”. It was only after I’d written it down that I realised how truly accurate this was. I should know. I’ve raised toddlers. This is how they roll: Technically, toddlers ARE continent. They understand the theory. They can demonstrate continent behaviours IF they choose to do so but only under optimal conditions. When your 3 year old announces that they “need the toilet” it’s like a pin on a grenade has been pulled. You have minutes before “stuff happens” so work the problem promptly. Your 3 year old will “need the toilet” with the kind of frequency that defies credulity but choosing not to believe these requests take one back to my previous point. Given suitable distraction, toilet training might go out the metaphorical window. Peeing in your pants is really no big deal when you’re a toddler and may seem the best (or most convenient) option available at the moment. Sometimes toddlers just forget NOT to pee in their pants and do it anyway. It’s fairly unlikely that your 3 year old will be dry at night: at least reliably so. For the sake of sanity and mattresses, it’s better that they be dressed for bed accordingly. Despite the unpleasantness of managing your toddler’s nappies, there’s a distinct relief from danger when they are returned to being nappy-clad for some reason (typically for an anticipated inability to remain within 60 seconds of a toilet for some period of time). There is the comforting certainty of containment. You know where the pee is going to be and it’s NOT your car’s seat. Looking at that list, that’s what things are like for me at this point on my experiment. I have a toddler-bladder now. For real. I’m about as reliably dry as my kids were when they were three. It’s not the completely-unpotty-trained nirvana that some of us are fixated on but it’s a conclusion that withstands the cold, hard light of dispassionate review. Will this situation continue to devolve? Will I regress to a two year old bladder? The one where its owner is curiously carefree (and somewhat oblivious) about any and all things that occur between waist and legging elastics? I don’t know but my current intent is to find out. Still, three isn’t such a bad age to be stuck in. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got to go, get down on the floor and hurl a monumental tantrum as my beloved has delivered my dinner on what I regard as the “wrong” coloured plate for when one is three, is the sort of criminal negligence that cannot go unpunished.

Yeah, The Ghan and the Indian Pacific. Those are the uber-expensive ones. The train from Brisbane to Sydney is, well, uh, interesting... I haven't taken it myself but I know others who have. It's not a popular service.

It sounds awesome. I love the idea. Pretty much any holiday that doesn't involve an airport (or a cruise ship) sounds good to me. There are a couple of "great" train journeys available down here but the inevitable reality is that for most of the time, you're in the outback somewhere (flat desert) and they are *ruinously* expensive! I've only been to Canada once (drove there from the USA) and was kind of caught up seeing friends of my beloved. I really didn't get the chance to do it justice.

I've thought about this as this journey has left me a bit underwhelmed by the engineering that goes into adult nappies. The medical grade ones at least, seem to be designed to win tenders rather than actually work. Whilst I think a full-on bespoke sized nappy built for an individual would just be prohibitively expensive with cumbersome lead times, I still think there are other improvements that could be made: ^This. Abstracting the plastic waterproof/hold-in-place outer layer into a separate "pull up" garment is something I've often wondered about. In addition to being more environmentally friendly and economical by reducing single-use plastic components, that should give manufacturers more flexibility and simplicity in providing shaped inner pads that fit this re-usable outer garment. Perhaps we could even have some kind of hour-glass shaped pad that would afford some side protection in bed - something that appears to be literally unavailable on the market today.

As I recall from my own experience when starting out “24/7” (at a fairly similar age), leaks were pretty much par for the course. This settled down as I learned what nappies/sizes suited me and how best to wear them. It settled down even further when my psychology and physiology started to adapt to permanent nappies. It sunk in to my brain that there was no point letting my bladder fill so I just let it go pretty much whenever. Quickly, physiology followed along. Being unused to the exercise, I found my bladder complained more quickly when filling and so I slid into a pattern of peeing more frequently albeit with lower volumes each void. That phenomenon you’ve noticed is going to help your nappy/diaper cope better. They seem to prefer constant drizzle as opposed to monsoonal flooding. I briefly came back out of 24/7 after a couple of months and within a couple of weeks, things got back close to where they were before. I then went back to 24/7 and have been there ever since. There's not much "holding" capability left now and I wet my diapers slowly, progressively and somewhat automatically during the day.