Little Sherri

This was my parents' philosophy. I had a plastic top sheet on my mattress but on the several occasions where my parents test-drove transitioning me out of wearing diapers in bed, the result would be me waking up at 5 AM in soaked sheets, and then laying there, or trying to roll over to a dry area on the bed and fall back to sleep for a bit... but in soaked pajamas, or I'd get up and put on dry PJ's, but then they'd become dirty immediately, because I was still doused in pee when I put them on, so at some point everything would have to go into the laundry. Once that happened more than two or three times, the conversation came around to "It's not your fault, you're body just hasn't caught up with your age, but a good night's sleep is important for you to do well in school and to grow big and strong, so tonight I think it would be best if..." And then came the long walk over to the closet to get a diaper from the box on the floor in there.

A couple of further quick notes on another week navigated from within my infantile underpants... my wife's baking show once again lamented that "Nobody likes a soggy bottom" on a flan or a cheesecake or whatever, which caused her tilt a glance my way, because I was hanging out in an Incontrol BeDry Night that I had been in for 18 hours at that point, and it was heavy. It acted like a high-end super diaper should, though, and did not leak into my clothing at any point, no matter how much I sat on it in various locations, walked around, climbed stairs, etc. I probably could have slept in it but I was by that point getting tired of sitting in a pond. Earlier, I was regretting my diaper choice, because my daughter had texted me and asked if I could pick her up at work at about 8 PM, and I thought to myself.... "Hmmm, you've spent the whole day in this diaper, it's pretty bulky... should you change it?" But then the devil on my shoulder said, "You're not even going to get out of your car! Don't worry about it. Why change now - shower and change when you go to bed. You spent $4 on this diaper and you know it has a few hours left in it... it's comfy...." The devil won. At least I put jeans on, rather than wearing track pants... fast-forward to my arrival at her place of work, when I get a text from her that she had already left with one of her friends who has a car, to go to her house for a quick visit, and why don't I just go over there and pick her up? I can't say, at that point, "Because I'm wearing a huge soggy diaper...". Well, I guess I could have said that, but... I still have some dignity in me, I guess. And I thought, fine, I'll just sit on their driveway and doom-scroll the news feed. But the Universe had plans for me, as it always seems to... I'm good friends with my daughter's coworker's dad. And his wife saw me sitting on their driveway and texted me to "Come on in and have a beer..." Sh*t. I like beer. I just don't like going into someone's house and hanging out while wearing a super diaper at >70% of it's capacity. AND, an additional wrinkle, one that worked both for, and against, what the Universe wanted to see play out, is this: I'm pretty sure these people know I wear diapers. So, on the one hand, that factor removed the "Oh God what if they find out I wear diapers" concern, but on the other hand, it was the genesis of another anxiety: "They know I wear diapers so this huge diaper is going to be obvious to them... their eyes are not going to skip over it as anomalous data, they're going to mentally raise an eyebrow and think, yup, diaper." Regardless, I was backed into a corner. Declining would have been weird. So I untucked my shirt, left my light spring jacket on, went in and sat at their bar-height kitchen table, sipping a beer on a stool, unable to completely close my legs. Sigh. I got home and planned to change then, but my daughter beat me once again, this time commandeering our ensuite shower, which is what left me hanging out with my wife in a diaper that looked like it had a blower running under it, keeping it inflated. Then came the soggy bottom comment.

I would say the legs under my ABDL table, in terms of routine, are: - Always wear a diaper - Change it when it needs to be changed or when it gets uncomfortable - Thou shalt apply diaper cream at every change - Thou shalt shower daily, more so if something egregious happens in thy diaper - Treat diaper rash seriously and immediately Everything else is the sauce and the side dishes; the steak, for me, is wearing diapers. I wouldn't enjoy sleeping with a pacifier if I didn't also have a diaper on.

Very cool!

The money part of this has come up, but it's not, I suspect, the core of my wife's general lack of enthusiasm for having a husband who wears diapers all the time, everywhere. She has commented on occasion that I have more than enough of them in stock (I probably have 13+ cases right now), and she told me at one point that I should turn off "automatic reordering" because she thought that was what was happening when a case of diapers showed up on the porch every couple of weeks. I've explained that I double down when they are on sale, so my inventory of baby pants is actually saving us money, and also, that ABDL diapers are cheaper to wear in the long run, because they are so much better than all but the best medical diapers - I can wear 2-3 ABDL diapers a day, whereas I would be burning through probably 6 cheap diapers at least, and also doing more laundry. However, ultimately it comes down to a question of what we each want to do with our share of our money. First of all, I make most of it, but I don't every really pull out that card - she does a lot of stuff for the kids, for example, that you can't really put a dollar value on, that I don't have time to look after - God help me if I ever have to go shopping for dance tights or makeup or bras. But, she also buys cushions for the outdoor furniture, or she buys a new lamp for a spot where the current lamp has been working just fine, or she buys 10 X as many shoes as I do, or she wants to go visit her parents in Florida and take the kids, etc. So if she starts hinting about wanting to audit my diaper expenditures, I say, okay, no problem, bust out the credit card bills and let's drill down on what we're spending.... except she knows from previous exercises in this vein that inevitably the forensic analysis is going to come back showing she spends 4 X what I do every month. So, hey, maybe I don't need Baby Panda diapers in my arsenal, but maybe the colour of the linens in the guest room is fine, and the goddamn table cloth print doesn't need to reflect the season... oh, it's okay if I buy Baby Panda diapers? Okay. Thanks.

I agree this is a strange gambit to use on this chessboard - some people still speak in terms of Rearz being disreputable because of it, although if they'd shot someone instead, they'd be on parole by now, and evidently it hasn't hurt their business too much - they launch a new diaper every six weeks and they've expanded their headquarters again. But I wonder if this is also being misinterpreted - for example, ABU attempting to trademark the term BabyFur, or Rearz seeking to trademark ABDL, only really gives them dominion over the term as it applies to a specific product. So if ABU makes a diaper model called the BabyFur, then Bambino can't go produce the Bambino BabyFur, but they could still market, say, the Bambino BabyTail, and say "Attention, Babyfur's, we have the best diaper for you" in their material. They just couldn't name it the BabyFur. Chevrolet used to manufacture a model called the Baretta, way back at the dawn of time (the late 1980's), and there is an Italian gun manufacturer by that name that was founded in the 16th century. They got into a dispute over the use of the term, and the resolution ended up being that, basically, Chevrolet would only build cars, not firearms, using that name. Similarly, the name "Kodiak" is currently used by a trailer manufacturer, a boot company, a company that makes sheds, one that makes power equipment, one that makes pancake & waffle mix, and also a mining company. I could go start making Kodiak diapers, and if I sought to trademark that, it would only apply to diapers.

I'd be a no to this. I'm married and I have two daughters, and all of that has taught me that living as a female is complicated! Whereas I can wake up, not shave, throw a t-shirt and jeans on, and be in the car in 5 minutes, and look perfectly acceptable, assuming my diaper isn't approaching its limits.

Not so much when I'm "horny" - reaching for my credit card tends to have the opposite effect on me. But I'm a sucker for sales, or, as I would prefer to describe it, I am a "shrewd buyer." I wear diapers 24/7 so their per-unit cost is a consideration - I'm going to burn through 2-4 of them per day on average, and if they cost $6 each, that becomes notable at the end of the year. So, I watch for the sales when I can. The post-Covid inflationary environment has only heightened my price sensitivity - I became concerned at one point that diapers were going to go from expensive to "absurdly expensive", and in some cases, they have - MegaMax diapers up where I am (Canada) are close to $200 a case now. Great diapers, but... damn. So when Rearz or InControl do their BOGO or 25% off sales, I tend to leap at them... which is how I ended up with 13+ cases of diapers in my basement, and my wife giving me the stink eye whenever a bulky package gets left on the porch. I guess you could say that I've "binged". But part of me says "Well, now I can go 6 months without shopping if I need to - I can always make it to the next sale!" Except the next sale is probably only 3 months away... you can see my problem.

Quick little anecdote, part of which I have may have mentioned here before - the drugstore nearby redid their shelving about a year ago, and they moved the adult diaper products over next to the youth/baby products, where previously, adult products were stocked with the sanitary pads and such. Although the "incontinence pads" are still stocked over there, whereas anything that pulls up or tapes on is now an aisle over. I guess it becomes a conundrum for the shelf planners - an incontinence pad is closer in packaging and appearance to a sanitary pad, but on the other hand, from a functional prospective, it is an incontinence product. But I guess it's a bit of a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" argument. However, they have put up new signage again - this time, overhanging, rather than on the caps at the ends of the aisles. My younger daughter was the one who actually pointed this out to me; we were in there picking up a prescription for my wife, and I said "Hey, do you want to see if they have any of the new Goodnites in stock yet?" - they released some new Goodnites designs which we found in the US but that had not made their way up here the last time we looked for them. So we angled towards the appropriate aisle, and then my daughter pointed out the three signs that were hanging from the ceiling over it - one read "Baby", one read "Diapers", and one read "Training Pants." I asked her if she found that insulting - her and I often trade jabs about if pull-ups are "diapers" (she contends they aren't) - but then she said, "Well I guess I can ask you the same question!" - and pointed out that the adult diapers were in the same aisle, progressing seamlessly from the adolescent pull-up sizes. Not that I buy my diapers in the drugstore very often, but, touché.

Congrats, @Enthusi - assuming that's appropriate, of course. I tend to view losing weight as aspirational, but I know that's not always the case. I tend to trend in the opposite direction, although I did drop a fair bit of weight about a year ago. My body is a strange shape, with tree-trunk legs that are bulky relative to my waist size - often my legs need an XL while my waist could work within a large or even the outside edges of a medium. I also buy diapers from a number of manufacturers, which leaves me in this position: Rearz' "newer fit" diapers work best on me as an XL, but L will fit, though snugly. Whereas in their "original fit" diapers, XL is large on me, and L is generally just right. However, I still have medium NorthShore MegaMax diapers in my inventory and they fit. Their size L would also work, and their size XL is approaching bariatric proportions and would probably leak on me and go up to my chest. When I wear the medium MegaMax or the new Rearz large diapers, I know what you mean - the tabs are over towards my hips, rather than out in front of me, and the whole diaper feels slimmer and snugger. I don't mind the feeling, because I grew up wearing diapers that were small on me (it was the pre-pull up era), but I do have to be careful about leaking over top of the front of the diaper, for example, if I'm sitting or laying down, and I'm pointed the wrong way down there. Whereas in an XL diaper, I'm covered past my belly button, so I don't have to worry about "orientation" down there.

Would it be worth renting a van or a trailer and driving somewhere else in Europe, and making a bulk purchase every six months or every year? Or would they get smacked with some kind of import duty?

Just dropped in to say that I'm wishing you the best and hoping all goes as expected. If how I live is the lifestyle equivalent of flying commercial, then you're out there test-piloting hand-built prototypes.

I work from home 90% of the time right now - mostly in online meetings or on the phone. I'm 24/7 so I wear diapers even when I go into the office, but when I'm WFH, it's usually a golf shirt or a sweater up top, and just a diaper down below. It's great - I get so much done, not having to get up. And as much as sitting around in just a diaper might seem gratuitous, it saves me some laundry, because sometimes diapers leak. I have a waterproof mat on my chair in case that happens. I don't use a pacifier that much during the day (although I sleep with one), but if I'm concentrating hard on something, sometimes I'll use one. I've had the odd panicked moment where I hear someone coming up the stairs to my office, and I assume it's my wife, but I'll still be like "Honey, is that you...?" in case it's the internet guy or something. "Here about the router..." "One SECOND! GIVE ME ONE SECOND!"

I spent a busy weekend doing work around the yard - some of it in my own yard, more of it in other people's yards. It was one of those Canadian "smells like Spring" weekends where by most objective standards, it was still "cold" outside - using metal tools without gloves on became uncomfortable after a few minutes. But that's still a big improvement over "became uncomfortable instantly, and became dangerous within a few minutes", which is where we were scant weeks ago. I actually wore sunblock - this side of the planet is now tilted sufficiently towards our radiation provider, that my ghost-white skin can pick up some colour from it. I wore onesies on both days, which used to be fairly common practice for me, but a combination of being busy at work, and it being winter, saw me not doing a lot of athletic bending, kneeling or squatting at other people's houses over the last couple of months, so I've been tending to just wear tucked-in t-shirts and overhanging sweatshirts or sweaters. At home, I don't really practice any diaper security protocols - that cat is well out of the bag. But this weekend, it looked (if not felt) like it might get warm enough to not need a sweater, and I had plans to help fix a fence and assemble a garden shed, so I moved discretion up the priority list a bit. I've been test-driving my BeDry EliteCare stock, trying to figure out if they're a great diaper, or just mediocre. I had one bad experience with one - my first experience - where it leaked earlier than I would have expected for a 10,000 ML ISO product. But since then, I've worn them a bunch of times, and they've been bulletproof, holding more than I expected and not dampening my clothes or my chair. They stood up well to the outdoor manual labour. Despite going up ladders and bending down to the ground like some kind of cross-fit routine, I kind of forgot about my diaper, held in place as it was by my onesie. It was nice to sip beer, get stuff done, and dribble away carelessly in the company of good friends. I even toddled around the house for a while dressed like that - my jeans had muddy knees so I tossed them in our ground-floor washer as soon as I came into the house. I planned to eventually take a shower but was in no hurry to do so, but neither did I want to put other clothing on, when I was painted up with sunblock and dust. The diaper felt like it had a couple of hours in it yet, the onesie was comfy, my kids were out, so made some tea and read the paper looking like a 6-foot, literate toddler, I guess. One place where my diaper security protocols failed me was leaving evidence of my predilection for wearing oversized Pampers on the dining room table. I'd gone down to my basement stash to reup specifically on the EliteCare's, but I still had sufficient other stock in my diaper drawer not to require a full restocking run. I had a stack of three of them in my hand Saturday morning when I got called away from my mission, to try and retrieve lot ear buds from behind a radiator. I put the diapers down on the dining room table on Saturday morning... rescued the ear buds... and then threw a sweatshirt on and went out to the garage, and never came back in the house before leaving. I got home late that evening and ate reheated pizza in the kitchen, took a shower, got into an overnight diaper, and eventually went to bed, having walked by or through the dining room a dozen times, without realizing that next to a stack of books my wife was planning on lending to someone, and a box of coffee pods from Costco, three adult diapers sat in plain view. Sunday, I was out and at it again for most of the day, culminating in the diaper shirt lounging described above, in the early evening, and it wasn't until I went looking for my water bottle, right before turning in for the night, that I rediscovered them. I came walking back up to our room, holding the stack in one hand and my water bottle in the other, and my upon seeing them, my wife said "I didn't know why you'd put those on the table, so I left them there." I explained that I'd forgotten them after bringing them up from the basement, and nothing more was said about it, but I was slightly disturbed. On the one hand, it is somewhat cool (in a use of the term that only we here could fathom) that I now live in a world where a stack of diapers is a ubiquitous and inconsequential as a box of Kleenex or a paperback novel, sitting in some obvious place in the house. IE, it's not like, say, a firearm, or bag of narcotics or the presidential nuclear codes. But on the other hand, I was gone for most of the weekend, so I had no idea who might have paraded through the house in my absence - my kids' friends, my wife's friends, possibly my in-laws... maybe someone she's having an affair with... who knows. SO, while the diaper on the dining room table were clearly my fault, I felt like maybe my wife could have picked them up and thrown them on my bedside table or something. But, seeing as I was wearing a onesie over a swollen diaper, I decided that she had the high ground, so I didn't point that out.

Update: I stumbled across something I haven't seen before that is kind of in this vein - someone was offering up a large collection of vintage pull-ups & diapers for sale, and one product they listed where pull-ups in both boys & girls colours that looked like shorts rather than being cut more like underwear. I have no idea how they worked - if they had leg cuffs at the hems of the shorts, or built-in underpants with an overhanging, short-like exterior, but evidently the market is not begging for these, because nobody makes them anymore.

I used to offer to help my mom by dashing off to other aisles to get this or that box of crackers or cereal, or paper towels, and I would always divert up the baby aisle. I eventually scraped up the nerve to ride my bike up to the drugstore in our local strip mall, so that I could drop my saved-up allowance on a cardboard card of diaper pins, which I then used to turn towels and pillow cases into diapers. They were not very effective "protection" - I made plastic pants out of plastic bags but the fit was very ad hoc - however I wore them to bed a lot, and occasionally around the house under my clothes - I loved how they felt even if I couldn't use them very often. I even wore a homemade diaper to school a few times in the 6th grade, which I now realize was bonkers, but at the time was a very exciting prospect.

I've been using mine every night for a bit more than 5 years, and I haven't gotten a rash from it, although I will say that paci rash is a real thing - my younger daughter was more or less never without her pacifier for roughly the first two years of her life, and she had perpetual dermatitis on her cheeks as a result. But she was a rash-prone baby and she drooled a lot and, being a baby, was not prone to worrying about it or wiping her cheeks off - that was our job. I don't use one a lot during the day (although I just popped one in right now while I'm typing this), but during the day, I don't drool around it. At night, I do drool a bit, but I wash the paci and my face first thing every morning, and it has yet to irritate my skin. This is a real thing as well - I started using a paci clip religiously after a couple of instances: I lost a pacifier sleeping at my friend's place in their guest bedroom, when we got up and had to leave right now for an event. I was over there later in the week and made up an excuse that I'd lost a sock, in order to conduct a grid search of the bedroom, and I found my paci under the bed by the headboard - but I had been sleeping badly, imagining his wife finding it if she swapped out the bed linens. I also left one sitting on my desk in my office while I went out for lunch... and came home to my daughter printing off a stack of resumes up there, while my pacifier sat on my desk next to my laptop. And once I had it with me while I was cleaning up in preparation for a visit from my in-laws, running around the house doing 20 things at once, carrying cleaner and paper towels and the vacuum and a duster, I sat down to a well-deserved cup of tea and a glance at the newspaper... the doorbell rang and my in-laws came in... and then it hit my like lightning that I'd put my paci down somewhere. I did a frantic "ha ha, nothing going on here!" scan of the obvious places, did not find it, then eventually located it on my bedside table, which was not where I'd left it - all I knew was that I'd last had it on the main floor. My wife had found it somewhere and deposited in its final resting place. SO, yeah, clip your paci for safety!

My daughter has a teddy bear that is now out of diapers I guess, but she had a size 6 Kirkland diaper on that thing for years, and, incongruously, a vest.

I was a champion bedwetter until I was 10, then it tapered off and I was pretty much done with it by the time I was 11. My parents tried everything - withholding liquids, waking me up to pee in the middle of the night, charts and stickers and treats, promises about away camps and sleepovers... but what was required, evidently, was a physiological maturation that only time could provide. My older daughter completely skipped this, basically potty training herself before she was 3, but my younger daughter has followed in my footsteps, except that we haven't bothered with attempting to incentivize overnight dryness, because I know she has no control over it. And sure enough, she is aging out of it - Goodnites used to be on the shopping list every 3 or 4 weeks, and now it's probably bimonthly at most.

Congrats, @oznl! Some days, I don't know whether to thank you, or curse your name, but either way, I wouldn't be where I am today, if I hadn't started reading your story. You are proof that an intelligent person can arrive at an illogical solution to a preposterous problem, and somehow, end up as a mentor. This really spoke to me, and I think it gets to the heart of something I have danced around a bit on my thread... the political capital we're expending. Neither of us live in a van down by the river, yet anyway, so I guess that gets chalked up in the win column, but it's more of an armistice than a treaty. I may be a bit more circumspect about it, because of the reality in my marriage that there are aspects of her that I at least strongly disfavour, if not outright hate, but I have to live with them and work around them, because they are areas that she's not seeking growth in. Some of them are well calcified. I have to take the good with the bad. I know there are people here who would say "I would never settle, you're not being true to yourself, you only get one life...", but the things I am talking about can take a long time to become apparent. And in the meantime, we built a life together, intertwined finances, and made people. Those things can be undone, of course (with the exception of the people we made, well, not legally, anyway) - armies of people do that for a living - but I know a lot of people, including a lot of divorced people, and the grass over there isn't necessarily greener. There's one guy I knew who blew out a battleax of a woman who entrapped him while he was a virginal nerd, but in medical school, who now has a penchant for running marathons, and a Porsche, and his second wife is awesome - she knows what she's got and so does he. But I know a bunch of other people who are either divorced, or their spouses have died, and they've determined that middle-aged people on the dating scene, like unemployed people, are often there for a reason, and the good ones aren't unaffiliated for very long. So would it be better for me to strike out for greener pastures? While towing a trailer full of diapers behind me? I'd probably end up being extorted by a Russian dominatrix who's actually a man. The corollary to that being, I bring some attributes to the table - income stability, an ability to function as the family cruise director, socially, a really, really long fuse, interpersonally, and, I can fix stuff. Could she do better? Maybe. But I'd bet it would take more than a few rolls of the dice. SO, I'm me, and I do some things really well, some other things okay, some things not well at all, and, I have unfathomable underpants preferences, to someone from Planet Vanilla. I guess she can hit the reset button anytime she wants to, but so far, she hasn't. However, for a couple blissfully in thrall to each other, as we were all told it was supposed to work, I could see macerating in pee-soaked nappies 24/7 as being like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a soft white white goose down duvet. Whereas for me, it's more like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a patchy lawn.

I agree - pacifier addict, which is Rearz. That's their size 6 adult pacifier, with a print on it - but you can customize them, so it may be something someone ordered, rather than something they list. I was going to get one with a Pampers logo on it when I was there in person a couple of years ago, but whereas the pacifier costs like $5, adding the print brought it up to $20 or something... not worth it to me. I have like 25 of them already. But if you find that image and go to them with it, they can make that for you.

I've found this with Rearz' large-sized newer products. I moved to the XL in some models, even though by waist size, I could still theoretically wear a medium. The size of my legs makes the lower taps barely reach the front, which is more of an issue with hook/loop fasteners, because if you don't overlap that mesh, you're toast, unless you use a mechanical fastener like a pin or a staple. I'm in a Mega Barnyard right now in size Large, and the lower tabs are only half on the mesh. Granted, they are staying put - I slept in it as well and none of them came off - but the next size up would be a better fit. Whereas I can still wear a medium MegaMax, and an XL MegaMax would go to my chest and be visible from space.

Happy Anniversary!

The world is full of sources for negative feedback for people who are wired in unconventional ways. Rare indeed is the space where people can explore their thinking in a relatively open, safe place. I can see where the "cult of positivity" critique comes from - for example, there are sites where people talk each other through the logistics of killing themselves supportively, and I definitely see that as a questionable sort of "positivity", for example. But here, when someone says, "I'm going into a purge cycle" or "I have to put this behind me", I don't see an outpouring of objections, generally; people say "I've been there" or relate their experiences or, often, they are understanding, and wish them well. And when someone comes here and says "I feel so alone - I can't talk about this with anyone, and I feel so screwed up, I hate myself... what's wrong with me!?!?", they get "You are not alone." Which is powerful, and has probably saved lives. And they get questions like "Are you really hurting anyone, or mostly your wallet and your skin integrity? Should you hate yourself?" Whereas when someone says "I am compelled to wear just a diaper in public", they get shut down immediately by most posters - it's definitely not an avalanche of "Good idea!". SO people who have left ABDL or whose lives are not conducive to living with it, or who have been convinced by the 99% majority that this difference in them is one that needs to be repressed or expunged, probably need a place to not be alone too - and they've found it, on Reddit. It don't think it's a place that would agree with me - I am enjoying being at peace with my harmless interest in whimsical underpants. I know from a lifetime of experience that if I want negative feedback on anything that's different about me, it is available, in abundance. I was a DL from the dawn of my earliest memories, well before puberty, well before I could spell "diaper". I didn't choose this - it chose me.

I've never seen one, although I thought about putting together one for myself, for the products that I stock or have tried. I have a spreadsheet that lists the products, and their various attributes - plastic/cloth, tape/hook&loop/, printed/white, bulk, subjective notes such as comfort, capacity, what size fits me best, etc, and how many I have in stock, if I want to buy them again. I thought about adding a column for ISO ratings, and then maybe another column for bias - IE, if I diaper claims to have a 12,000 ML capacity, I know it's not going to hold that much, but, that would be a "Porsche-level" performance claim... so, in real life, is it one of the best diapers I've ever worn, in terms of capacity? Yes? Then it gets an A. And if a diaper that claims to hold 4000 ML, held more than I expected, then it might also get an A. Whereas a diaper that claims to hold 10,000 ML, but left damp spots on my jeans within four hours, gets a C, and one that claims 2800 ML but leaked in the first hour gets an F.