Little Sherri

I was a champion bedwetter as a kid, but I never really wet my pants during the day, after I was maybe 3 or 4 - it was strictly a nighttime issue for me. Exceptions would be when I fell asleep during daytime hours, usually in the car, but that still pretty much counts as sleep-wetting, if not "bedwetting", strictly speaking. I also sometimes would wet my diaper, when I was awake, if I still had it on, just out of convenience - if I got up in the morning, didn't immediately take my diaper off, and then went downstairs to watch Saturday morning cartoons, for example, but those instances weren't "accidents", unlike when I wet while I was sleeping, which was pretty much never deliberate.

I had the thankfully-rare experience of having a pacifier go off for some reason, one of the nights this weekend. My practice with them is to use them for a few days, rinsing them every morning, and then I put them in my "used paci" breathable bag, and when there are enough in there, I pull them apart and soak them in sanitizer and let them dry and then reassemble them, before putting them in my "clean paci" bag. By following that routine, they always smell daisy fresh, but Saturday night, I was falling asleep, and I kept getting whiff of something slightly earthy, to the point that I sniffed my pillows and blanket and even my shirt, but they all smelled vaguely like detergent. Then, my eyes fell to the pacifier dangling from my collar, so I pulled it up and bent the nipple back and gave it a good sniff. Yup - it smelled earthy, and slightly damp, like a cardboard box from a forgotten back corner of a basement, that has been sitting on concrete. I got up and went into the bathroom and pulled it apart, and sure enough, there was a ring of slime in there - evidently, I had perhaps tossed a used one into the new bag, or somehow missed processing it when I last did a cleaning cycle on them, something that I only really do about 3 times a year, because I have 25+ pacifiers in my inventory. I pulled it apart and soaked it in mouthwash, scrubbed it, rinsed it and put it back together, and then for the rest of the night, something smelled a little minty, but I may embark on my cleaning routine a bit early, and include the ones that are still in the "cleaned" pile, just to make sure I didn't put any back together when they were still damp. Thinking about this made wonder about other people's pacifier hygiene routines. If you use them with any regularity, do you have a process for cleaning them, and how many do you have?

I had a busy weekend, running all over the place with various errands. I went through more than the usual number of diapers, just because I found myself in the position, a couple of times, of being faced with going out for an extended period of time, when I was in a diaper that was at 50% capacity and that I knew would need a change while I was on the move, if I didn't hit the reset button and start from scratch. I blame this at least partially on not drinking enough this weekend. Don't get me wrong - I had some pints and a couple of glasses of wine, but there were no marathon sessions because I generally had to drive or get up in the morning, whereby abandoning my car would have been inconvenient. SO, I'd go to bed in something bulky and around-the-house rated, like a Rearz Barnyard, for example. I can wear a Barnyard, if it's not too swollen, out and about for the purposes of, say, shopping or getting gas or walking the dog, but it's a bulky diaper to put on under my jeans if I'm wearing "I'm mildly paying attention to how I look in this" clothing, IE not very oversized, frumpy and overhanging gear. I put the Barnyard on when I got home, at say, 10 PM, then wore it overnight, and through the morning, before realizing I needed to leave at noon... but I hadn't really wet overnight so the diaper still had a few good hours left in it, but there was no way for me to comfortably access them. As much as I'm within a couple of days of having been at this for 5 years, I still don't do diaper changes when I'm away from the house very often. I tend to choose my diapers for maximum range, within the confines of manageable bulk, and then I generally either get back home within a few to several hours, or, I'm staying overnight somewhere, in which case I will end up in a private bathroom that qualifies as a home base, if not my actual home. I can count on two hands the number of times I've wrestled with a diaper in a public washroom in the last couple of years, and then deposited a bagged dead soldier either in my backpack, or, in a trash bin. I did get a slightly wry, maybe-slightly-approving glance from my wife when I left the house with my new, very old diaper bag yesterday - I was going over to a friend's place to assist with a renovation, and I didn't know how long I'd be there, but I knew that I'd be in close quarters with him, so I wanted to be able to, first of all, wear less bulky diapers, and, second, plan to freshen them at some point if we went long. Ergo, I tossed a couple of Active Air diapers into the bag, alongside the staple Little Monsters and BeDry I have in there most days. I'd reloaded the diaper bag and then left it on the floor in the hall by the door, so I wouldn't forget it, but then I ended up getting my shoes on as she was getting hers on, to head out somewhere, so I ended up holding the door open for her, and locking it behind her, with my Jeep-branded diaper bag, a relic from when the kids were young, slung over my shoulder. I'm not sure if she actually expected me to use it or not, but it's more compact than my backpack, and occasionally, I want my backpack for other things, so leaving the diaper bag in my car doesn't leave me short a useful item. I had the thankfully-rare experience of having a pacifier go off for some reason, one of the nights this weekend, as well. My practice with them is to use them for a few days, rinsing them every morning, and then I put them in my "used paci" breathable bag, and when there are enough in there, I pull them apart and soak them in sanitizer and let them dry and then reassemble them, before putting them in my "clean paci" bag. By following that routine, they always smell daisy fresh, but Saturday night, I was falling asleep, and I kept getting whiff of something slightly earthy, to the point that I sniffed my pillows and blanket and even my shirt, but they all smelled vaguely like detergent. Then, my eyes fell to the pacifier dangling from my collar, so I pulled it up and bent the nipple back and gave it a good sniff. Yup - it smelled earthy, and slightly damp, like a cardboard box from a forgotten back corner of a basement, that has been sitting on concrete. I got up and went into the bathroom and pulled it apart, and sure enough, there was a ring of slime in there - evidently, I had perhaps tossed a used one into the new bag, or somehow missed processing it when I last did a cleaning cycle on them, something that I only really do about 3 times a year, because I have 25+ pacifiers in my inventory. I pulled it apart and soaked it in mouthwash, scrubbed it, rinsed it and put it back together, and then for the rest of the night, something smelled a little minty, but I may embark on my cleaning routine a bit early, and include the ones that are still in the "cleaned" pile, just to make sure I didn't miss any more, on my last time around. Thinking about this has inspired me to launch a survey on the topic.

Also coming up on 5 years 24/7, and I've cleared the first three of your hurdles handily. I've wet the my diaper in bed in places where it would have been deeply inconvenient, had they failed me. I've travelled with my family and shared hotel rooms on other continents and worn diapers throughout, even when I (occasionally) didn't feel like it. Bedwetting for me is an intermittent and unpredictable phenomenon. It can happen three times in one week, or once in three weeks. I define it as instances where I go to sleep, have no recollection of having awakened, and then I wake up and I'm wet, or wetter, than I was when I was last conscious. Alcohol increases the odds that this will happen. Sharing with professionals has happened - sort of - though unintentionally. The one that really counts is my primary care physician, whom I've had since I was a kid, and who obviously has a gambling problem or something, because he's still working a good-paying job, and he has to be 75. But I have not shared this with him - I'm waiting for him to retire, and then I will get a new doc, and my plan is to tell her/him that I have an overactive bladder, and I saw a urologist about it, and found out the medications are 30% effective and have undesirable side-effects, so I've chosen plastic underpants instead, next question please. But I did see a urologist - and get this: I switched from a diaper to a pull-up right before the appointment, because of some disturbance in the Force I detected, and sure enough, the first thing he asked me to do was drop my pants, in front of him and a resident. And then they made no remark about the fact I was wearing a pull-up, because they weren't there for that. So, an anticlimactic outcome. The other time was when I had an MRI during the pandemic and was given a translucent disposable gown, under which my diaper was visible to the point that a technician gave me a second disposable gown to put over my first.

I agree with what some others have said - I like the slow burn on this one. It's realistic. Kids don't concoct these ideas and then realize them within a couple of days, generally. They are working from a position of scant resources and minimal influence.

Rearz BeDry Night while I wrap up the week at work.

I lied! I must have thought I was talking to my wife. I just ran down and did a basement inventory. I have 12 cases. No Rearz sale for me.

I've been in diapers and more or less doing this for 5 years. The result has been a notably reduced cruising range; I can go a couple of hours without peeing if I have to, but it gets really uncomfortable within about an hour, whereas in the before times, I used to be able to go a few to several hours without peeing - I used to drive all over the country for work and I only peed when I got gas, which was easily 6 to 7 hours apart. So, not wearing diapers would be really inconvenient - I'd have to go to the washroom every 45 minutes to be comfortable. I have also lost the ability to stop peeing, once I start, so if I hold it until I'm bursting and then I start to pee, that's it, it's happening. I've experienced this with the "latchkey effect" - for example, going out to the bar, drinking more than I thought I would, getting close to maxing out my diaper, so I decide to stop peeing for the last hour rather than trying to change my diaper in a busy public toilet, which would also necessitate carrying a diaper bag, taking it to the washroom, excusing myself from my table full of buddies... SO, the cab or Uber drops me off in front of my house, and now it's been 90 minutes, and as soon as I hit the front door, I start peeing, but the diaper can't take it, so I feel a leak commence, and I try like hell to stem the flow but I can't, leaving me undressing with pee dripping down one of my legs, while my wife wonders what the hell is going on and why I speed-stripped before running into the bathroom. So, there's that. Also, letting myself pee at night whenever I need to has resulted in my being an unreliable bedwetter - more often than not, I wake up before peeing, but not every time. Sometimes I wake up soaked with no recollection of agreeing to it. Alcohol helps facilitate that, too.

I am so, so tempted, but I have a lot in inventory and my wife has been clucking about it. But it is a good deal. It works out to $103 CAD per case and free shipping. But I have like 9 cases - actually, more than that, in terms of the space they take up, but that's consolidating the open ones into numerically closed ones.

BeDry Nights Large - $3.82 CAD per unit, $4.31 AUD, when bought by the case. That goes up by 12 cents if you move to the XL, which I probably would - I bought the large, but I'm right at the edge of that size. These conform to the new Rearz sizes where the larges have shrunk a bit and the XL's are no longer of bariatric proportions. Strangely, I can still wear a medium MegaMax, so I have three sizes in my pantheon - NorthShore medium/Rearz new large, Rearz old large/Rearz new XL, and then NorthShore Large/Rearz old XL, which go up to my diaphragm and the middle of my back. I had a couple of mildly notable experiences yesterday. First of all, speaking of the BeDry Night, I was wearing one under a onesie and jeans, when I found myself in the very strange position of being surrounded by floor-level, high-angle mirrors. We were in a store looking for shoes for my daughter, an excursion I would never have willingly accompanied, except that we were coming back from somewhere else, as a unit, and this stopover was on the way. They were changing up the decor in the store, and had left several ~7 foot mirrors lying on their sides propped up against the baseboards at 45 degree angles more or less. This was not to be their final resting places - the contractor had evidently run into a snag with hanging hardware and had abandoned the project until the next day. I can see no other reason to lay out fragile mirrors in such a strange and vulnerable position in a public space... except to facilitate upskirt photography, and I did look around, half expecting to see a camera pointed at the mirrors, but none were obvious, and the only person working was a middle-aged female. If the place had been tended by a male of the species, my suspicions would have peaked. So while my wife and daughter looked at shoes... I looked at me. Both in mirrors hung on the walls, and, from that strange angle from the floor. From the direct, front-on or back-on perspective, with my overhanging jacket, oversized jeans, and general middle-aged puffiness, I did not get a "that guy is wearing a fairly compact but still heavy-duty overnight nappy" vibe. But viewed upwards from the floor at a 45-degree angle, yes, I could see the outline of my diaper, vaguely. Interestingly, I didn't care. I'm within 5 days of having been doing this for 5 years now. You can be a middle-aged, relatively healthy guy, and wear diapers, and be reasonably discreet about it, but not to the point of paranoia, and, life goes on. I'm sure, the odd time, someone has looked at me and thought "diaper." People like us, who have honed our high-resolution diaper radar skills, probably can pick it out with an even greater hit rate, although being spotted by a fellow diapernaut doesn't really worry me too much - I assume that they'd give me a fist bump if they could. But even if some stranger in a mall concludes "that guy's wearing a diaper", well, so what? That's going to be "end scene" on most such moments. That doesn't mean anyone should be stupid about abandoning modicums of discretion - having ones diapers sticking out all helter skelter rises to the level of "I think that weirdo intends for me to see this" and conscripts the innocent. But, 5-years-ago me could not have comprehended how not a big deal wearing diapers could be. On another note, I pulled into an LTC centre's parking area in order to turn around while searching for an address yesterday... and ended up briefly (pun there) pulled up in front of two hulking dumpsters, both with the lids propped open because they were bursting with large clear plastic bags laden with the white, beige and blue carcasses of hundreds and hundreds of diapers. This caused me to have two thoughts... first of all, although I sometimes feel pangs of guilt about the environmental impact of this hobby... well, ABDL people might make up, what, 1% of the population? 0.5%? Less? Whereas >50% of people are eventually going to end up being 85 or older (if you live in Canada, anyway), and about 21% (average between male and female) of them will experience some form of incontinence. SO, that's 10.5% of the population, or, for Canada, about 4.5 million people, a good proportion of whom will end up in disposable something-or-other, for part of their lives. SO, I am a drop in the ocean. That said, the engineering side of my brain asked what the heck we could do with all those diapers, besides burning them for heat or burying them for centuries in the ground. I know smarter people than me are already working on this, but in my head, I am designing a machine that will separate the shells from the stuffing, shunt them off for processing into bus shelter benches or something, and then the rest gets anaerobically composted for methane to generate power, and, a nutrient-rich soil additive. I'm looking for investors.

I'm still mulling over yesterday's diaper dream, because it was so weird. I didn't have one last night, by the way. I'm trying to figure out whose baby that was; I have friends of South Asian descent, but none of them have kids that young. Ahh, the mysterious machinations of the subconscious. Less mysterious would be the status of a Rearz Daydreamer diaper, with it's close-to transparent cover, and that came into play last night. My family is back, by the way, and regarding that, I'm glad they're back - the dog is good company, but he's not much of a conversationalist, mostly making exclamations that are fairly repetitive. In the before-times, I would have been both looking forward to having my housemates back, and, slightly depressed about packing away all my baby pants and donning the boxer shorts of sadness and responsibility, whereas now, I didn't give my underpants a second thought. Which perhaps I should have, at least yesterday. I was washing dishes and streaming a TV show I don't often get to watch, it being unpopular with the females I reside with, and thinking to myself, I should go take a shower and get changed, before they get back, and there is a press for our shower stall, which is more popular than the one in the kids' bathroom, because it's roomier and the water sprinkles gently from overhead in a rain-like pattern, rather than attacking you from the side in a pressure-washed-in-prison pattern. But I got caught up in finishing the episode, and then they were coming through the door, and then my daughter had priority for the shower, as she's the one with a bedtime. Once she was done in the bathroom and off to bed, it was like an hour later, and the Day Dreamer I was in was very, very wet, although still holding and still largely comfortable. But, I was getting into the "I've been in this thing for 15 hours" zone where I'm just tired of being damp, so I wanted a shower and a fresh nappy. My wife went down to the kitchen, and I thought, now's a good time, so I stripped down to my diaper to prepare to get showered, but then I caused a chain reaction accident on the floor when I kicked the dog's bed and it nudged his water bowl, and a bunch of water sloshed out and onto the hardwood. SO, I went to get paper towels from the cabinet... and found the roll missing. However, I knew there was another one in our linen closet, so I left the confines of our room to get it... and ran into my wife, coming back with a beverage. Her, with deep sarcasm evident: "Nice outfit, I kind of missed being confronted by a man in a soaked diaper while I was away..." What could I say? The Day Dreamer was undeniably sagging, but, much more than this, it was inarguably yellow, practically from stem to stern, in the areas that weren't tinted iridescent pink or blue. I don't know if these things integrate a wetness indicator or not, but they definitely don't need one, anymore than an aquarium does. You can tell when there is fluid in there. I then had to go back into our room, thusly attired, with the paper towel I had retrieved... and start cleaning liquid from the floor. "What happened there?" "Nudged the dog's bowl." "You're sure?" "Well, it's entirely around the dog's bowl, do you have another theory?" "Just checking." (Squelch squelch squelch... the sound of me walking around the room...) If I had to bed, I would say that the stuffing in a Day Dreamer is exactly the same as the stuffing in every other diaper Rearz makes, varying by the amount the put in, and maybe, the SAP to pulp ratio, but it has to be the same stuff, more or less, you'd think. However, the Day Dreamer I had on did a really good job of wicking out from the blast zone. It was wet really high up the back by the time it hit the floor, and almost had a cloth diaper "enveloped in a uniform cloud of moisture" feel to it. And, it didn't leak, which suggests that fluid had moved up in the queue to other areas, leaving room behind it. I didn't mind how it felt at all, until maybe the last hour, when I had had enough. Comfy diaper - if you haven't tried one, I recommend you do. Just not in front of anyone whose judgements you are concerned with.

Rearz Daydreamer. This diaper has a transparent cover and keeps few secrets, but they're comfy and hold a lot.

I had a diaper dream in the wee hours of the morning, this morning, and it was a strange one, although not at all unpleasant. First of all, I have been having more, or at least recalling more, fleeting diaper dreams lately, and what sets these apart from most of the ones I have had in the past is that in those dreams, being in a diaper featured heavily, whereas in the dreams I am referencing here, being in a diaper was incidental. Although, still obviously notable, because presumably, I was wearing socks in those dreams, too, but, I wasn't aware of it, whereas I was aware that I was diapered. But in these dreams, other weird stuff is going on - dream hocus pocus, world building, problem solving, and at some point I see or feel my diaper, but I'm not distressed about it at all. In one dream, I was in a room full of people, and we seemed to be working on a project, something involving a terrarium and whatever was going on inside it - maybe we were trying to get lizards to mate. In the narrative as I understand it, we were all working together, however I was walking around in a shirt and a diaper, and it wasn't notable to anyone, including myself, and was totally secondary to the fascinating stuff we were doing, which was the primary focus of my mind's eye. However, in the dream from this morning, I found myself lying on my back, on a bed, next to a young baby - an infant, who was also on his back. The baby was a boy, and he was brown in colour, although of no specific race. He was wearing a white onesie, and I turned my head just as he turned his, and I locked eyes with him, and he smiled at me, and it was heart-melting, as baby smiles often are, and I smiled back, and then I said to someone in the room, "You have a lovely baby", and this person, a woman with a slight accent, said "Thank you, yes he is." And I continued to look at the baby and he looked around and then looked back at me, as babies do. Then, it dawned on me that both he and I were there for diaper changes. This lady, whose image is fuzzy to me, was changing the baby's diaper, and I was lying there, also in a diaper, although the physics of all this is a bit nonsensical, because he and I were face to face, both lying perpendicular to the bed, but obviously, he'd have been about 50 inches shorter than me, in real life, so how his mom or whomever she was, was standing and tending to him, while I was also laying on the bed, face to face with him, does not compute, unless the bed had an extension on my side like a chaise lounge, or was L-shaped or something. Regardless, I was apparently awaiting my turn to be changed, but not by this lady - I had no expectation that she was going to undertake the operation. I remember thinking to myself, well this is funny, isn't it, that both this baby and I are wearing a white onesie and a white diaper... and then I woke up because my dog nudged my face with his cold, wet nose. I've not dreamt about anyone changing me for a LONG time - I have a recollection of a vivid childhood dream where I woke up late for school and was whisked out of my room by my parents and thrown into the car immediately - which even then, did not check out, because my parents almost never drove me to school - and then all of a sudden I was in class, but still wearing my pajamas, and I knew I still had a diaper on, and somehow the teacher knew, and she took me into a back room that my real classroom did not have, and said she was going to change my diaper, and I said something like "It doesn't need to be changed! I just need to take it off..." and that's all I recall. It's burned into my brain because it was probably the only diaper dream I ever had as a kid, or, it's the only one that made any impression on me - because it was a nightmare, essentially. I did NOT want my teacher to change me. So it's in there with a dream I had when I was young about a roller coaster that went off the tracks, and one about falling off of a roof, both of which left me awake, with a scream frozen in my throat. From then to now, though, I have not had a dream where someone was going to change me, or did change me. Nor have I been changed by anyone, in real life, for that matter, since I was of a single digit age. But this dream was not at all unpleasant - the lady changing the baby seemed very nice, given the oddness of my presence there. I was somewhat irritated that the dog yanked me out of that world - I wanted to see what was going to happen next. Stupid dog.

This happens to me fleetingly from time to time as well, and I have likened it in the past to coming across a deer in the woods. If I move, or stare directly at it, it's gone, and I have no ability to summon it back. It's very pleasant and perhaps it would be easier to summon if I meditated on it - I have never really meditated before, at least not deliberately.

First of all, I'm honoured to have my character mentioned in the same sentence as All My Mother's Rules, which I consider to be an example of writing excellence within this genre. That said, I'm still struggling with Kelly's motivations. She's definitely a bit of a witch, in her soul, but I do think that part of her wants what @cdory is alluding to... to be a real parent to these kids who have canonized their beloved, departed mother, while chaffing under the autocratic rule of their dad's new wife. She just has no idea how to go about it. The dynamics of their relationships stem at least in part from my experience with having a stepparent, whose methodologies I had bottomless disdain for, when I lived with him, and then as an adult, for two decades afterwards. However, when I became a parent myself, I came to realize that the stepparent role is not an easy one, and that perhaps not all of his intentions were malign, as much as some of his behaviour definitely was.

I decided to copy the following over from another thread, because I was once again summarizing my "origin story" for the resurrection of a thread from 2020 that had new life breathed into it, about how we came across our unusual fascination with babies' underpants, when I had a bit of an epiphany regarding what might have kicked "this" off, in addition to being a chronic and accomplished bedwetter as a kid. I think I may have delved a little into this before, but as I hurdle towards my 5 year "diaperversary", perhaps I have worded more succinctly here, than I did in previous go arounds. The epiphany centers on the fact that I was likely being potty trained, just around when my little brother was born: It's been interesting reading through this resurrection of an older thread! I knew that I loved diapers before I knew that I loved diapers, because "this" has been part of me from my earliest memories. Dabbling in armchair developmental psychology, if I had to speculate, I would say that the origins of my fascination with wearing plastic baby pants probably stem from being potty trained when my younger brother was an infant - he was born right around when I was going through that process. I have zero recollection of this, of course, but it is probable that I was being weaned off of wearing diapers, just as the new arrival came into the house, and obviously took up a lot of my parents' attentional bandwidth (as babies do). It's not hard to imagine the scenario - I was put on the fast track out of babyhood because they had a demanding new customer to deal with, and I probably noted what felt, at the time, like a decline in attention or positive feedback, coupled with added expectations. Meanwhile, the new guy had zero responsibilities, got nothing but glowing reports, and of course, he spent his days laying around the house, swaddled in Pampers. Meanwhile, nobody knew it yet, but I was on track towards becoming a champion bedwetter. I mastered daytime potty training on a normal schedule, but could not stay dry overnight. Fast-forward another three years, and the situation went from "He's taking his time figuring out staying dry overnight" to "Evidently, this is an issue." When my younger brother did not struggle with bedwetting, my situation came into sharp relief - they were putting him to bed at 3 years old in his "big boy underwear", while I was still being put in Pampers at age 6. Once I was the only person in the house whose underpants still came in boxes of 30, the campaign to get me out of them went into high gear, with dry night sticker charts and ticker-tape celebrations, and waking up to go pee in the middle of the night and no drinks after dinner, but to no avail - it would take another 4.5 years, roughly, before I could stay dry for more than a couple of nights in a row. Now, some of you may be thinking, "Imagine that, the kid who secretly liked wearing diapers kept wetting the bed... clever boy!", but, I have zero recollection of ever contriving to wet the bed deliberately, in order to stay in diapers. As much as I secretly loved wearing them, I also wanted my parents to be proud of me, and I was paralyzed with anxiety over the idea that my friends, cousins, or anyone, would find out that my I still wore taped-on underpants to bed when I was 7,8,9, & 10. One of my eternal regrets is that I didn't think of doing exactly that, when I finally did outgrow bedwetting, because it took me about a month to realize that no longer having a supply chain for "legitimately sourced" babies' underpants had created a major hole in my life and in my psyche. Ergo, I started manufacturing my own, using safety pins and pillow cases and towels and cut up plastic bags, by the time I was 11. However, as much as I finally confirmed, with no uncertainty, that I had a weird attraction to diapers, when I started getting up in the middle of the night to handcraft my own, I already basically knew that, because I'd had an instinct for as long as I could remember, that the expectation was for me to not be enjoying wearing them to bed as non-toddler, to the point that I pantomimed resistance at times, but, here's the thing - most of the time, I actually wanted to wear them. With the exception of whenever anyone outside of my immediate family was around. Then, they were a source of tremendous anxiety. Plus, I was fascinated by anyone else who wore diapers, and I used to steal any that I could get my hands on, even though I had my own. I was friends with a little girl when I was 5-8 years old roughly, whom my parents called my first crush, who wore diapers - that's what inspired my pen name on this site. I was absolutely riveted by her, whenever she was around, even though, logically, a kid knotted up with anxiety over anyone discovering that he wore diapers to bed should have been trying to put miles of daylight between himself, and the strange little girl that everyone knew wore diapers. But I used to follow her around like a puppy on a leash, because part of me wanted to be her, while part of me wanted what every other kid wants - to grow up and be considered "big" and for their parents to be proud of them, etc. It's a rich tapestry, this! Now, here I am, four decades later, sitting in my office in a big white plastic diaper, writing about them with a cadre of like-minded individuals, which in itself is a paradigm shift akin to the invention of electricity for me, because I spent more than three decades firm in the belief that I was alone on this island, a population of one.

It's been interesting reading through this resurrection of an older thread! I knew that I loved diapers before I knew that I loved diapers, because "this" has been part of me from my earliest memories. Dabbling in armchair developmental psychology, if I had to speculate, I would say that the origins of my fascination with wearing plastic baby pants probably stem from being potty trained when my younger brother was an infant - he was born right around when I was going through that process. I have zero recollection of this, of course, but it is probable that I was being weaned off of wearing diapers, just as the new arrival came into the house, and obviously took up a lot of my parents' attentional bandwidth (as babies do). It's not hard to imagine the scenario - I was put on the fast track out of babyhood because they had a demanding new customer to deal with, and I probably noted what felt, at the time, like a decline in attention or positive feedback, coupled with added expectations. Meanwhile, the new guy had zero responsibilities, got nothing but glowing reports, and of course, he spent his days laying around the house, swaddled in Pampers. Meanwhile, nobody knew it yet, but I was on track towards becoming a champion bedwetter. I mastered daytime potty training on a normal schedule, but could not stay dry overnight. Fast-forward another three years, and the situation went from "He's taking his time figuring out staying dry overnight" to "Evidently, this is an issue." When my younger brother did not struggle with bedwetting, my situation came into sharp relief - they were putting him to bed at 3 years old in his "big boy underwear", while I was still being put in Pampers at age 6. Once I was the only person in the house whose underpants still came in boxes of 30, the campaign to get me out of them went into high gear, with dry night sticker charts and ticker-tape celebrations, and waking up to go pee in the middle of the night and no drinks after dinner, but to no avail - it would take another 4.5 years, roughly, before I could stay dry for more than a couple of nights in a row. Now, some of you may be thinking, "Imagine that, the kid who secretly liked wearing diapers kept wetting the bed... clever boy!", but, I have zero recollection of ever contriving to wet the bed deliberately, in order to stay in diapers. As much as I secretly loved wearing them, I also wanted my parents to be proud of me, and I was paralyzed with anxiety over the idea that my friends, cousins, or anyone, would find out that my I still wore taped-on underpants to bed when I was 7,8,9, & 10. One of my eternal regrets is that I didn't think of doing exactly that, when I finally did outgrow bedwetting, because it took me about a month to realize that no longer having a supply chain for "legitimately sourced" babies' underpants had created a major hole in my life and in my psyche. Ergo, I started manufacturing my own, using safety pins and pillow cases and towels and cut up plastic bags, by the time I was 11. However, as much as I finally confirmed, with no uncertainty, that I had a weird attraction to diapers, when I started getting up in the middle of the night to handcraft my own, I already basically knew that, because I'd had an instinct for as long as I could remember, that the expectation was for me to not be enjoying wearing them to bed as non-toddler, to the point that I pantomimed resistance at times, but, here's the thing - most of the time, I actually wanted to wear them. With the exception of whenever anyone outside of my immediate family was around. Then, they were a source of tremendous anxiety. Plus, I was fascinated by anyone else who wore diapers, and I used to steal any that I could get my hands on, even though I had my own. I was friends with a little girl when I was 5-8 years old roughly, whom my parents called my first crush, who wore diapers - that's what inspired my pen name on this site. I was absolutely riveted by her, whenever she was around, even though, logically, a kid knotted up with anxiety over anyone discovering that he wore diapers to bed should have been trying to put miles of daylight between himself, and the strange little girl that everyone knew wore diapers. But I used to follow her around like a puppy on a leash, because part of me wanted to be her, while part of me wanted what every other kid wants - to grow up and be considered "big" and for their parents to be proud of them, etc. It's a rich tapestry, this! Now, here I am, four decades later, sitting in my office in a big white plastic diaper, writing about them with a cadre of like-minded individuals, which in itself is a paradigm shift akin to the invention of electricity for me, because I spent more than three decades firm in the belief that I was alone on this island, a population of one.

I didn't set out to train to wet the bed, per se, I just wanted to wear diapers all the time, including to bed. I had a childhood history of being a champion bedwetter, but had outgrown that, and other than a couple of incidents, my adult years had mostly been spent on pristine, dry bedding. Once I started wearing diapers to bed, I became annoyed at having to wake up in order to pee in them, and I would tend to barely awaken, start the process, and then drift off to sleep again, while it was still happening. At first, I remembered most, if not all of these instances, but after doing it for months and years, I found myself waking up in a wet diaper once in a while, with no recollection whatsoever of having wet it, and that started happening with more frequency, although it is still far from clockwork. At this point, 5 years in, I sometimes go a week or two without any recorded instance; it can be hard to know for sure, because I sometimes go to bed already a bit wet. Other weeks, I wet my diaper overnight 3 or 4 nights out of 7 - it's very unpredictable, other than to say that, #1, alcohol helps, and #2, Murphy's Law definitely seems to have some influence in this universe, because it seems to happen more often when I don't necessarily want it to, such as when sleeping over at friends' houses, or in a hotel. Although I usually would have had at least a couple of adult beverages under such circumstances, so maybe rule #1 is more powerful than rule #2. But I believe that the Universe has a sense of humour, so if I'm going to soak some sheets, it is more likely to occur at the Hampton Inn or at my buddy's place, than it is at my own house on a night when my wife is away, and there would be next to no consequences.

There is not a lot for me to add here that hasn't already been said. I've been 24/7 for just a couple of weeks shy of 5 years at this point. I have not lost any daytime control, just lost some cruising range - it's inconvenient to have to hold it, but far from impossible. The result of letting myself wet in bed for that length of time has been that I sometimes wake up wet with no recollection of having done it (alcohol helps with that), so you could say that I'm an unreliable bedwetter. Definitely take care of your skin, and I would add that any diaper rash that doesn't dissipate within a short period of time should be suspected to be fungal in nature, and treated accordingly, via the creams or sprays that are readily available for jock itch, yeast infections and athlete's foot. Per what most everyone else has said, very few people pay much attention to what you're wearing in my experience, and the sound of your diaper is a lot louder in your head than it is in real life. That said, I will also say that when you are in diapers all the time, everywhere, the odds tilt in the favour of somebody seeing or finding out something, sooner or later, so you do have to be ready for that eventuality. Anyone you live with probably will figure it out, eventually, and circumstances can conspire against even the tightest security measures, given enough opportunities. So, the odds of someone you don't know figuring anything out on any given encounter are vanishingly small, and even if they did, arguably, who cares, since you don't know them and they don't know you. But someone that you spend a fair bit of time with, statistically, is more likely to eventually notice something. I would echo what others have said as well, that the rules to this game are determined by you alone. Don't gauge yourself by what someone else claims to have accomplished or to be able to get away with - "this" is supposed to be for fun, or at least, to make us feel better, so don't do anything that isn't fun, or that doesn't make you feel better, and, don't involve the innocent as nonconsenting participants, would be my advice.

I was buying no-slip slippers for an elderly relative, having become familiar with the technology while looking after my parents. They have the ability to yawn open to the point where the wearer is essentially plunking their feet down into an open vessel, rather than sliding or squeezing your foot into a shoe, and then the tongue gets overlapped by Velcro flaps on either side, making it easier to get them on and off, with minimal bending required, but at the same time, they're secure once they're on and not likely to trip up the person wearing them, who might then break a hip. I mention this because while I was in that store, I came across a bag of medium-sized Tranquility ATN diapers on a blow-out rack for half price. I currently have some large ATN's in my inventory, and use them as a light-duty plastic diaper for fill-in service between longer-shift products, or where a relatively thin plastic diaper is called for - for example, it would be something that I might wear for an MRI or a massage, where I don't relish the visible bulk of a better diaper under a hospital gown or under a towel, and where cartoon characters are not called for. Although I do hope that I can eventually get to a place where I'm comfortable enough to feel that whimsical diapers are just an aesthetic choice and not a lightning rod for judgement. I never worried about what anyone would think of my Homer Simpson-themed boxer shorts. But I digress. I looked at the sizing chart on the diapers, and it suggested that I did fall into the upper end of the range for the product, so I thought to myself, I might as well dollar-cost-average my "portfolio" downward a few decimals of a percentage point, and take them, for $1 a diaper, even thought they might not be the most versatile tool in my arsenal. Putting them on and then wearing them for a few hours provided an unexpectedly nostalgic experience, even if they were nearly useless on me, and one leaked catastrophically less than an hour into its shift. Adult diapers almost never reference weight, going strictly by waist size for the most part, or also offering hip guidelines, on some products. Children's diapers, on the other hand, are pretty much always categorized by weight, and there is a major philosophical difference between the two approaches, in my experience. Adult diaper manufacturers are often slightly to wildly optimistic about what sizes their products will accommodate, and, absolutely hyperbolic about fluidic capacity, whereas children's diapers (and pull-ups) are typically underrated in terms of sizing, and they almost never mention capacity in any way, other than to maybe say that the product can provide "up to" 12 hours of protection. So, size 7 and 8 diapers that are rated to 42 or 46 lbs, can accommodate waist sizes that line up with the average 7-10 year-old form, even though 7-10 year-olds typically weigh 60-80 lbs. All of this came together in my mind because squeezing myself into those overrated ATN's reminded me very much of wearing underrated Pampers as a kid. I could only land the upper tabs of the ATN's on the front of the diaper - there was no hope for the lower tabs, which effectively resulted in my wearing white plastic, single-tab diapers, where the tabs just landed on the very edges of the front of the diaper, and only with some stretching. ATN's have the tab-on-a-tab system employed by BetterDry, for example, rather than a reinforced landing zone, so at least I didn't have to worry about making it to the runway - all I needed was an inch of plastic on each side. But you do have to worry about overwhelming the adhesive attraction between the lower and the "second chance" upper tab sandwich, and that did happen to me, necessitating a repair with white glossy hockey tape. This was also something that happened on occasion as a child, when the tab on one side or the other would blow off, often when I was wearing the diaper while roughhousing with my brother in the winddown period to bedtime, as we watched Knight Rider or The A-Team in the living room, for example. My mom would just slap a piece of Scotch tape as a bridge from the back to the front, leaving me feeling very much like I was wearing a white plastic bikini, which was exactly how I looked in the ATN's this weekend. Those XL Pampers from back in the mid-to-late 1980's, as far as I recall, were rated for 20-35 lb "babies", yet I was squeezing into them when I weighed close to twice that. However, they had incredible capacity. I don't have any hard statistics, and obviously, memory is a strange thing, but, I only recall washing my bedding because of a diaper leak, very intermittently - usually my sheets just got washed on whatever schedule my mom employed for that, and tiny leaks or leg-gather wicking incidents (which sometimes happened underneath me when I sat on the edge of my bunk bed with my legs dangling down, a vantage point I enjoyed) weren't usually significant enough to trigger a bed stripping - they'd just dry up and then the bedding would get washed on Sunday or whenever - I really don't recall. Those were background processes, like shopping for milk, that just happened around me, unnoted for the most part. Only when a diaper really failed, such as if I peed up over the front and soaked my shirt and my sheets, did an off-schedule bed refresh occur. So, there you have it - an overrated and undersized adult diaper managed to transport me back to wearing underrated and oversized toddler diapers.

I am honestly of two minds about this. I grew up in white diapers, but I longed for the printed ones that came after I had outgrown being able to fit in anything that was available in non-specialized stores. So I love printed diapers, and half of what I buy is in that category, but, I have a place in my heart for white diapers, and half of what I buy is white.

When I put myself in Kelly's head... yeah, she's upset.

I have two words for you: psyllium powder. Metamucil is the most well-known version of it, but it comes in many forms. The official description of what it does is that it "acts as a gentle, bulk-forming laxative." What that means is, it traps water at a multiple of its own weight, swells up, is indigestible, and carries it through your intestines. It's sort of like diaper SAP (super-absorbent polymer) for your guts. Start taking it at whatever the high end of the recommended dose is and you will have bigger, squishier deliveries. I have not experiences this personally, but I have an elderly parent who has to use it religiously, or else he gets backed up for days. It works. It's also not a laxative in the pharmaceutical sense, in that it doesn't cause catastrophic urgency or change the way your muscles work down there or trick your body into dumping water and electrolytes back into your bowels. And then, do this.

I wonder what diaper it was? If it fit under jeans without being obvious, I suspect it would not be something from the ABDL pantheon, but I could be wrong about that. Does anyone have any theories? Anyway, it's great that she felt no shame about it, and spoke about it openly and intelligently. That's the way it should be.

I agree entirely. I know that when I wet overnight, without recollection of it, most of the time, I'm rolling over onto my back and making sure that mini-me is aimed at 6:00 and not at high noon. Occasionally, usually after drinking, I will wake up extraordinarily more wet than I was when I went to sleep, feeling like someone jammed a soaking wet sponge of a size usually reserved for church parking lot charity carwashes, down the back of my diaper, and the majority of the time, I will come to this awareness while laying on my stomach, which is how I usually sleep. I have on many an occasion then run a slightly shaky hand over the sheets around and under me, only to discover that there has been no breach of containment. So I know that I'm following the same protocol when I wet my diaper while unconscious, as I do when I get woken up by the sensation of a full bladder, and I do the needful while semiconscious. I sleep in disposables alone, most of the time. Usually good ones, but that doesn't matter - no disposable is immune to the physics of fluid dynamics, when called into active duty while enveloping the nether regions of a person sleeping on their side or on their stomach. And I rarely experience leaks. When I do, it's either the result of something unfortunate, like a folded-over front waistband wicking into the sheets, or, it happens when I've very thoroughly anesthetized myself with high-octane IPA or wine, and then I've peed flagrantly and extravagantly, without following the lockout/tagout procedures that are so deeply engrained in me.