Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Little Sherri]

The BetterDry is a good product. The only thing I'm not entirely fond of is the "tab-on-a-tab" fastening system. I like the "landing zone" approach. Also, if I recall correctly, they swell up mightily, although that is less of a deterrent for me than it used to be, back before I expanded my wardrobe so that I could wear decent diapers at will. 

[oznl]

3.5 years of uninterrupted nappy wearing clocked over this week.  It was a subdued, if slightly wet milestone, my 1,271st consecutive day spent in nappies and plastic pants under my big boy clothes.

I was supposed to have a medical appointment today that would have afforded me the chance to road-test my ability to stay dry for periods of time during the day this week but it didn’t happen.

A full skin-cancer check, there is no way I’d get through that in a nappy without it being noticed.  Still lacking any repeatable, convincing daytime “loss of control” my strategy was to keep the medical fraternity out of a matter that does not yet concern them.    This appointment would be all about grabbing an emergency pad to keep stuffed inside my emergency tattered-red-last-pair of-underpants, removing said pad before entering the clinic and rolling the pee-dice.

I’ve mentioned before, it’s entirely possible that this nappy-modesty is wasted with this particular practitioner.  By necessity, his inspection includes my bald, pee-leathery and slightly rash-cream stained nappy zone skin.  I must consider the possibility that he already knows.

As it happened however, the medical receptionist phoned me the day before the appointment in order to cancel it.

“You’ve got a booking for the 6th and we’re not OPEN” she announced accusingly.

What is it with medical receptionists?  Is arrogance something they learn on the job or a core competency they must display to obtain that kind of employment?

“Yes” I replied.  “I made that booking ahead at the completion of my last skin check as I was asked to do”.  I’d booked on that day because THAT was the day the snooty admin now remonstrating me had OFFERED ME!

“Well, we’re CLOSED that week!” she harrumphed, “I mean, that booking was made almost a YEAR ago!”

I’m assuming that back on that day almost one year ago, in the midst of COVID lockdowns, the good Doctor hadn’t had the chance to plan his next skiing-holiday-in-the-south-island-of-New-Zealand, or spend the day shopping for another Porsche and had instead decided opted to pass the time on October 6th by fleecing patients. 

Clearly this lapse in mental telepathy was all my fault.  I suspect she’d rather I just dropped the matter and took my chances with a resurgence of skin cancer but compounding her inconvenience, I pushed her for an alternate appointment.  Reluctantly, she sighed and offered one at the end of November. 

I guess that’s my next nappy-free road test.  I’m not interested enough to poke that bear without a reason.

I’ll be vaguely interested to see how that goes but I’m not really anticipating major issues.  I don’t notice peeing that much during the day now but as far as I’m aware, the pee that happens has happened because I chose to permit it.  There’s been the odd fugitive wee but even then it’s debatable that I HAD in fact authorised the release but somehow forgotten about it by the time that the nappy started getting wetter rolled around.  Additionally, my bladder capacity is low, it takes ages to void and drips forever afterwards so any attempt at practicing urinary continence is at this point, simply annoying.

I was always a bit sceptical of the “12 month guide” but I DID think I’d be forced into having those sorts of practitioner conversations by now.  It’s a curious mixture of relief and annoyance that I’m not.

I’m a pretty accomplished bedwetter by now though – no night garb is safe on me!

I still don’t have the SLIGHTEST interest in coming out of nappies.  Whilst I may not be a text book example of beatific happiness, I remain convinced that my overall levels of unalloyed joy are higher when permanently padded.

I guess “Year 4” is the next milestone so I might head on over to that and see what the landscape looks like from there…

[BabyJilly_S]

Congrats on 3 years, onwards and upwards! 

[Little Sherri]

8 hours ago, oznl said:

I still don’t have the SLIGHTEST interest in coming out of nappies.  Whilst I may not be a text book example of beatific happiness, I remain convinced that my overall levels of unalloyed joy are higher when permanently padded.

Congratulations, @oznl, and thank you for your service in diligently journaling your passage through these strange and varied waters. To your point, made above, I would say that I am in the same boat. Don't get me wrong; I haven't NOT questioned what the hell I'm doing here, a few kilometers in your wake, so to speak, but, wandering through that thought garden hasn't yet led me to consider any other option for, as you put it, maintaining my current level of unalloyed joy. Maybe opioids, or more drinking, could be substituted, but they come with their own lists of detractions. 

I'll shortly be facing a bit of a crucible, via my impending trip overseas with some mates, with shared accommodations, that we've already spoken about. I just can't come to any other conclusion than that I will be wearing diapers, or, I won't be going, and the latter selection would be giving the former too much power. So, that's that. All that has to be worked out is everything. But, my point is, that's how important "this" remains, to me. So, my hat is off to you. Cheers! I'm brewing this weekend and I shill hoist an IPA in your name. 

[BedWetMark]

15 hours ago, oznl said:

 

What is it with medical receptionists?  Is arrogance something they learn on the job or a core competency they must display to obtain that kind of employment?

 

I thought this was just a thing round here, they are frankly horrific in their attitude. Granted they must deal with some real twerps, but there is just not 'customer' care at all.

 

[oznl]

I had the weirdest nappy dream this week.  Historically, nappy dreams have sorted themselves into broad themes, the major ones being:

a.       Irrevocable, unambiguous exposure of my nappy (or their contents) to others

b.      I’m out and about, I need to pee, I keep peeing but it doesn’t seem to solve my problem

c.       I’m out and about, I need to pee, Oh, I’m in a nappy.  Ooh, I’m getting wet

Nappy dreams are not super-common these days (nappies being my lived-default for quite some time) but they DO still happen. 

Last night’s however was strange enough to remember and fell outside the traditional themes.

My beloved and I were out together somewhere.  I’ve no idea.  I guess in a dream it doesn’t matter.

What DID matter was that I knew my nappy was super-wet and I desperately needed changing but, in a tragic lapse in planning, I didn’t have another to change into.

I turned to my beloved and asked “Have YOU got a nappy I can change into?”

She sighed and slightly rolled her eyes.  She has an Olympic gold medal in slight eye rolls so this gesture lent a chilling realism to my dream.

“The only ones I’ve got are my pink Megamaxs” she said, her exasperation clear.

Suddenly, from some invisible fourth-dimensional cupboard (people are always pulling stuff out of thin air in my dreams so I conclude there are fourth-dimensional cupboards in a dream universe), she produced a voluminous, bright pink, thick disposable nappy, curiously identical to the one that for the first time I noticed SHE was wearing, fully exposed beneath her midriff.

I didn’t find that exciting of even surprising, I just noticed that it was a VERY pink nappy.

“Is THIS what we’ve come to?” she asked sarcastically, glancing downwards at the pastel-printed thing in her hand.  Ineffably I knew that the principle cause of her ire was the irrefutably feminine colour scheme of the garment and her considered view that this would be wildly inappropriate for her man.

No matter, silently but gratefully I reached out and took it from her: imminent nappy leakage risk eats nappy colour preferences for breakfast.

Weird huh?

It didn’t make sense on ANY level.

I’m still trying to work out if there’s some impenetrable Freudian symbolism going on here or it was just a side effect of a particularly spicy Chicken curry I’d cooked earlier.  I’m fairly sure I’d wet in my sleep along the way at some point but that’s kind of neither here nor there these days.

Answers on a postcard please: address them to “WTF was going on inside Oznl’s brain THAT night?” care of DD…

[CentralMaDL]

@oznlit sounds to me like you're subconsciously manifesting acceptance from your wife. My guess to causation would be a seeming uptick as of late on the board regarding spousal acceptance. Just my guess ? 

[oznl]

AARRGHH!!   NAPPY RASH!!  AGAIN!!

Given the proportion of time that I’ve spent marinating in pee-wet underwear for the last 3.5 years, my principle surprise with respect to this curse is that I haven’t seen more of it.

I’ve had the odd bout but nothing serious and usually precipitated by some sort of cavalier carelessness on my part.  It may have been dwelling in less-than-skin-friendly wet cloth nappies to the point of allowing ammonia to ferment within them.  Possibly, it could be skimping on change-time wash-down of the affected area.  Sometimes it wasn’t even rash at all but rather chafing by deciding to do something dumb like hike 5km in a wet, pinned terry towel affair with tight plastic pant leg elastics.  On the odd occasion, there were lapses in my “no #2 in the nappies” rule that I didn’t deal with promptly (THAT kind of used nappy can be a fast track to skin issues if not changed quickly and generally speaking, the mess is so ghastly that the motivation to change is not high – far better to sit around in it and ignore the problem).   In any case, all of these prior skirmishes resolved quickly in my favour in the face of additional sudocrem.

This rash has been a bit different.  This should come with a TMI warning but I promised myself that I’d be unflinching about this so here goes.

I noticed this particular issue on day #3 of my cloth nappy part of the week.  I was luxuriating in my evening shower when a sudden sharp undernote of pain from my undercarriage penetrated the pleasant sensations of warm water washing away evidence of my misdeeds.

Either the shower stream had switched from warm water to blasting grit the instant it touched the downstairs “head of the department” or something was wrong down there.

I rotated the stream again, and once again felt a white hot burn from an area that one really doesn’t want to feel burning sensations from.

Outside the shower, I inspected the relevant terrain carefully.

Under what was left of my foreskin (my parents, although not Jewish, followed 1930s fashion all the way forward to the 1960s and had me circumcised in the interests of “cleanliness”, or possibly “sadism”, I don’t know) the skin was red and curiously glistening.  It looked angry.  At one point on my sub-foreskin ring-of-fire, an angry lesion-looking thing-hole of broken down skin was visible, like the red spot on Jupiter but smaller, closer and less comfortable.

I’ve seen skin damage through nappy chafing but this wasn’t a chafing zone and as far as I could deduce, nappy rash (dermatitis really) doesn’t do that.

I bombed it with sudocrem.  Overnight, a new sensation appeared, minor twinges of pain from the relevant terrain whenever I wet my nappies – which is a LOT.

The next morning, it looked as angry as ever.

Somewhere from my personal, internal google-vault, I remembered that some nappy rashes are fungal rather than simple skin irritations.  Fungal rashes do not respond to simple rash cream and are famous for colonising cracks and crevasses in skin.

Uh oh…  Have I become a kind of sentient agar gel for growing fungi?

Clearly using Sudocrem in this scenario is the nappy-world equivalent of taking a knife to a gunfight.

Rummaging in my bathroom cabinet drawer, I found some old, mostly used Tinea gel.  Active ingredient: Terbinafine Hydrochloride.  I suspect that this medication has been rolling around at the back of the drawer since early in the century but I am a man and use-by dates are for the weak!

Putting it on broken skin stings.  To me, that says it MUST be doing something good (I realise that by extending this logic, being burned at the stake might be considered therapeutic but many good theories collapse at scale).

It’s a few days later now.  I wouldn’t say that I’m out of any metaphorical woods yet but I like to imagine that my new “red spot of Jupiter” is a little smaller and less angry looking than it was on the weekend. There are still twinges when I’m wet (which admittedly is most of the time) I also imagine that these twinges are less noticeable.  I plan to imagine some more across the coming weekend and reassess the situation then.

[Little Sherri]

Do you have access to anything containing Clotrimazole? It's a broad-range fungicide sold here for athlete's foot, ringworm, jock itch (all basically the same condition), and yeast infections. I find when something is fungal and you put a fungicide on it, the response is rapid, if you've hit the nail on the head (oh the puns...), but I am unfamiliar with Terbinafine Hydrochloride. I had a spot of what I thought was diaper rash in an unusual location, basically at my right hip, around where the nappy wings overlap, but I've been luxuriating in some higher-capacity products lately, which have padding that goes further around, and I thought, well, maybe that area has been damp, and it doesn't see diaper cream, so that could be it. Diaper cream did nothing, so I switched to the fungicide. Fungicide did nothing, so after a couple of days, I concluded that it was bacterial, and hit it with antibiotic ointment. Voila, victory was mine. 

Through careful forensic accident reconstruction, I have concluded that sometimes the hook/loop fastening system of my overstretched gym diapers gets an opportunity to abrade my skin there, a tiny, relentless finger of sandpaper that works the same square centimeter of skin for however long I'm in it. 

I liked your dream - I have not had one like that! I broke my drought of diaper dreams the other night as well, finding myself on a resort with assorted friends and family, locked out of my room via a keycard misfire, wearing a t-shirt and a diaper, and, having to walk across the entire complex to fix the problem, all the while convincing myself that everyone was just going to think my diaper was a bathing suit. What was novel about the dream was, in it, the diaper I had on was identifiable; not coincidentally, the one I'd gone to bed in, an ABU Little Kings. Most of the time in my diaper dreams, I am aware of the fact that I'm wearing a diaper, obviously, but as far as I can recall, it's never one specific diaper, just an archetypal plastic stand-in for any and all models. This time was different. 

So it's interesting to me that you identified the diaper in your dream. Do you usually get assigned a specific model by the undercurrents traversing the nappy Mariana Trench of your subconscious? 

[Stroller]

3 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Do you have access to anything containing Clotrimazole? It's a broad-range fungicide sold here for athlete's foot, ringworm, jock itch (all basically the same condition), and yeast infections. I find when something is fungal and you put a fungicide on it, the response is rapid, if you've hit the nail on the head (oh the puns...), but I am unfamiliar with Terbinafine Hydrochloride. I had a spot of what I thought was diaper rash in an unusual location, basically at my right hip, around where the nappy wings overlap, but I've been luxuriating in some higher-capacity products lately, which have padding that goes further around, and I thought, well, maybe that area has been damp, and it doesn't see diaper cream, so that could be it. Diaper cream did nothing, so I switched to the fungicide. Fungicide did nothing, so after a couple of days, I concluded that it was bacterial, and hit it with antibiotic ointment. Voila, victory was mine.

Absolutely!  I've never got as far as using an antibiotic cream myself - clotrimazole has always done the job so far.  Canesten is the brand name over here.

Get well soon!

[dribblez]

That's interesting @Little Sherri. I've had a couple of those abrasions at the top of my thigh too, but only on the right hand side and only after wearing Rearz poducts, although weirdly @oznl's Barry seems not to cause this. At first I thought it was an infection, but a couple of days in non Rearz products and a spot of Sudocreme does the trick.

[ppdude]

On 10/3/2022 at 1:02 PM, Little Sherri said:

The BetterDry is a good product. The only thing I'm not entirely fond of is the "tab-on-a-tab" fastening system. I like the "landing zone" approach. Also, if I recall correctly, they swell up mightily, although that is less of a deterrent for me than it used to be, back before I expanded my wardrobe so that I could wear decent diapers at will. 

That sucker swells like crazy -- you can't believe how fat it gets. Good stuff!!!

 

[oznl]

8 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Do you have access to anything containing Clotrimazole? It's a broad-range fungicide sold here for athlete's foot, ringworm, jock itch (all basically the same condition), and yeast infections. I find when something is fungal and you put a fungicide on it, the response is rapid, if you've hit the nail on the head (oh the puns...)

 

Yes.  So far the Nanny state of Australia is yet to conclude that its foolish citizens (it prefers to think of us as children) need to have Clotrimazole placed safely behind the Doctor's prescription pad, yet...  A quick google suggests that 1% strength creams based on this  can be bought retail.

I have a feeling that the Terbinafine HCL actually came from a Rite-Aid in the USA at some point, dating it firmly in the "before" times.

6 hours ago, Stroller said:

Absolutely!  I've never got as far as using an antibiotic cream myself - clotrimazole has always done the job so far.  Canesten is the brand name over here.

As it is here also...  Another weird echo of our British heritage I guess.  Looks like yet another left-field purchase from the chemist coming up.  Canestan was the most common brand.

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I liked your dream - I have not had one like that! I broke my drought of diaper dreams the other night as well, finding myself on a resort with assorted friends and family, locked out of my room via a keycard misfire, wearing a t-shirt and a diaper, and, having to walk across the entire complex to fix the problem, all the while convincing myself that everyone was just going to think my diaper was a bathing suit.

Yes, the inescapable and public exposure that could not be mitigated is (or was, hasn't happened for a while) a distinct theme in nappy dreams.  Similarly, whilst not entirely happy with the situation, I recall being far less frantic about this in my dream than I suspect I would be in real life.

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

So it's interesting to me that you identified the diaper in your dream. Do you usually get assigned a specific model by the undercurrents traversing the nappy Mariana Trench of your subconscious? 

No!  I believe that was a "first" for me.  Making it even stranger, the Megamax is not a brand that I've ever worn, or ever even seen close up.  It IS available in Australia (I've never checked to see if there are pink ones) now but is prohibitively expensive for daily use.  Thanks to the US Federal Reserve, the AUD is sinking faster than a rock in a pond so presuming that the vendors of the Megamax prefer to be paid in US dollars (as opposed to South Pacific Pesos), I can't see it getting cheaper any time soon.

 

[Puppyz]

Lamasil Dermgel (Terbinafine Hydrochloride 10mg/g ) can be had from a chemist without a prescription. I used it to good effect when I had a rash on my outer leg back in January. I suspect it was ringworm from christ knows where, but it cleared up fairly quickly (it got to be a large rash due to working away and not having access to a doctor of chemist) . 

It comes in a little blue 15g tube for about $15AU

[oznl]

Yay for Terbinafine Hydrochloride!  The “red spot of Jupiter” is definitely disappearing.

I had one of those “exposure” themed nappy dreams last night.  This hasn’t happened for quite a while.  I’m wondering if it was somehow triggered by the discussion with @Little Sherri about this very topic.

In my dream I was (just like in real life) in bed, trying to sleep.  That’s where plausible reality and my dreamscape parted company.  My bed was in the middle of a large kitchen/living area and there was a full on a party going on around me.

Looking blearily out of bed to my right, I saw some vaguely-maternal looking women standing over and Esky (Chilly bin, Ice box, choose whatever dialect works for you) full of alcohol.  It looked like they were mixing Margaritas.  Cocktail shakers were being shaken left right and centre enthusiastically.

One of the women noticed that I was awake.  She told me to get up because it was my turn to shake the cocktails for a while.

Well THAT was never part of the deal.  I was still pissed because they were conducting a party in my “bedroom”, making their drinks was a bridge too far!

Getting out of bed, I realised that I was dressed only in a t-shirt and a white nappy.   Oh well.  As I made my way across the party floor, a small kid called out “hey!” behind me and grabbed my arm.  I thought he may be going to pass comment on my nappy but as it turned out, it was some other nebulous thing.   Maybe he wanted a Margarita?

Walking through the crowded room, I quickly I realised that nobody passed comment or even seemed to notice that I was dressed only in a nappy south of my t-shirt.  I assumed it just didn’t matter.

Reaching the Esky, I told the Alcohol Madams that I hadn’t signed up as bartender.  They weren’t at all pleased at this news.

Realising that further sleep would be impossible and the phalanx of women around the esky were displeased with me, I turned and walked outside.  There, the house’s driveway was the car parking lot.  I decided to mis-use the firehose and wash the sugar that was piled on its concrete apron down the drain, still clad only in my nappy and t-shirt. 

I hoped that they would see that I WAS doing something useful and would forget to be cross with me.

Putting aside the general level of surrealism reflected in this dream, those “my nappy is exposed to all and sundry, there is nothing I can do about it but nothing bad is actually happening either” dreams happen enough for them to the thematic. 

Probably emblematic, for something.

[oznl]

So this week I found out how things in the pee department work if I try to use toilets.  It was only for a few hours and a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing designed to help close out the rather irritating (on many levels) nappy rash I’d picked up.

It was last Friday, my “day off” (during which I do unpaid housework instead of paid work).  As usual for a Friday, I’d greeted the dawn from the swaddling comfort of a pinned, wet, cloth nappy.  Despite the rash, I didn’t feel that I was wet enough to warrant an immediate change and so, fending off the inevitability of a hot date with a vacuum cleaner, I lounged around and made sure the internet worked (it usually does but I feel it’s important for me to check it).

Eventually, at around 9:30am, I unpinned my wet terry (not really as wet as it should have been, more on this later) and had a shower.  My rash was considerably better but certainly not 100% gone.

I felt some “air out” time was in order.

Rummaging around in my spares box, I found some Tena pull-on pants.  These are so close to “no nappy” that I thought they would be good enough for “air out” time.  I pulled on a pair, some shorts over the top, and went about my day resolving to use the toilet like a big boy should, leaving the Tena there simply for swiftly-removable insurance.

Accepted vernacular is that after nearly 4 years of 24/7, I should wet myself unstoppably at some inconvenient juncture.

I did not.

What I DID need to do was to pee every 90 minutes.  WITHOUT fail.  Generally speaking, I’d be noticing some urges within an hour but by the 90 minute mark, those urges had sufficient physiological heft to them that they could not reasonably be ignored.  I could have tempted fate by trying to wait longer but the warning signs were clear, the urges were too uncomfortable to ignore, and the objective was to have “dry out” time, not “mopping up” time.

The subsequent toilet visits thusly precipitated (no pun intended) were curiously and irritatingly unsatisfying.  Flow was quite weak, the volume of pee small, commensurate with the 90 minutes I’d spent assembling it, and a degree of post-void dripping meant that the Tena saw incredibly minor action (commensurate with its incredibly minor abilities) anyway. 

It all worked though.  I can’t stop the flow once it’s started but I’ve known that for ages.

There were some near misses.  As morning turned into afternoon, I “cancelled” a pee release that seconds before, I’d thoughtlessly authorised.  In each case the cancel button got hit before pee hit my pull-up.  It wasn’t incontinence, it was rather the manifestation of a deeply-ingrained habit of not bothering to control pee.  I honestly think this is where my bedwetting comes from.  I’m not “incontinent” overnight, I simply am so deeply conditioned toward not holding pee that when asleep, my sub-conscious just goes with the daytime flow.  There is some evidence supporting this in that I will often bedwet within two hours of falling asleep and with quite low void volume.  I’m not going because I need to go, I’m going because that is what I do.

It’s an open question if, given a longer period of time in “dry out” mode, I would forget to “cancel” one of these semi-automatic pee releases and wind up with wet shorts since a Tena pull up has the absorptive capacity of a damp budgerigar.   We could then have one of life’s more left-field metaphysical debates as to whether this was incontinence or idiocy.

We’ll never know because before long it was 5:30pm and time for my evening shower.  There was nothing more in my pull up than post-void dripping.  After the shower, I changed into a thick cloth nappy and normal transmission resumed.

So that’s what things look like 43 months down the “24/7” road.  Usable daytime continence but I need to concentrate on it and accept that I have to pee every 90 minutes.  It’s possible that with some bladder re-training I could recover that.

It did occur to me that as I’ve speculated before, the “90 minute” range is insufficient for me to do my job with any hope of practicality and is also less than the 120 minute “timed toileting” program advocated by continence Nazis but it still doesn’t tick the incontinence box.  98% of wee that appeared was expected to do so.

90 minutes pee intervals:  that’s a fact-oid you can take to the bank.  Nothing else is proven.

[Little Sherri]

I discovered a very similar design limit on my recent travels. I switched from wearing reliable and bulky diapers everywhere I went, to only wearing them at night, to limit how many I needed to pack, and in the interests of discretion, as I was sharing a room for the trip. During the day, I wore dismal man pull-ups that only worked to catch accidents or to drop off some "product" if I was more than 90 minutes away from the next toilet. I ran back and forth to the loo several times a day, which made the whole project workable, but, it wasn't fun or comfortable. However, other than at night, I did not, at any point, wet myself unexpectedly. 

[oznl]

This week (technically late last week) I found myself on work-travel perilously close to my principle nappy dealer (Littles Downunder – I’m sure they won’t mind me name-dropping).  Since shipping has become a plaything for the hyper-rich these days, I decided to leverage my locality and call in to pick up a case each of my “usual” nappies:  the BetterDry and the Barry (Rearz Incontrol Elite Hybrid). 

Even just the nappies are becoming an extravagance lately…

I’d assumed I was running low based on the unreliable evidence of being a bit vague about when I’d last bought some.

A few minutes later after a brief-but-pleasant chat with the proprietor, I was on my poverty-stricken way home to discover that I in fact had just plenty of BetterDry and Barry waiting for me.  Now I have enough packs to construct a full-scale play fort from which to launch unprovoked medieval counter-attacks on the cat should it unwisely choose to enter my study.

Attempting to stow away the latest arrivals inside my groaning nappy cupboard, the BetterDry appeared to be the same as usual but there was something different about the “Barry” this time.

They were in smart new packs, freshly adorned in a suitably authoritative shade of clinical blue (replacing the previous, slightly garish but-let’s-face-it-you’ll-never-have-it-on-display-in-your-living-room-anyway green labelling that did look a bit like somebody’s high school level marketing project).

Also gone was the rather banal, tri-lingual bullet list of dubious marketing claims on the label, replaced by the almost-inevitable photograph of a happy, smiling (and presumably nappy-clad although they never show that) adult couple that so often graces adult diaper packaging.  A simple head-and-shoulders shot, at least they weren’t pogo-sticking across the African savannah or heading off a cliff edge in a crotch-grabbing flying fox, the kind of action shots favoured by nappy vendors attempting to suggest that their products alone afford the kind of hyper-athlete-class pee containment that just might keep Aunty Doris’s wee off the couch. 

As you might expect, the models selected for these product shot are carefully selected:  WASP, coiffed and smiling through pearly white teeth.  Mature, but not so mature as to suggest at senility or geriatric.  The kind of mature that might reassure the nervously-new-incontinent that people possibly younger and better looking than them are in fact squishing around in pant-loads of their own whizz in perfect contentment so perhaps they might want to come back in off that metaphorical window ledge and tape on a “Barry”.

Rearz should SO let me do their marketing – I’d be awesome.

Barry has been renamed too.  The nappies formerly known by their manufacturer as “Rearz Incontrol Elite Hybrid Briefs” are now re-invented as (insert a drum-roll here) “Rearz Incontrol Hybrid Brief Elite”!  Cunning huh?  I’ll bet a pretty penny worth of market research dollars was snorted up some agency nostrils to come up with that kind of revolutionary re-branding.  I’ll stick with calling them “Barry”.

And then, that all important piece of disingenuous marketing babble: “New Fit!”

Uh oh…

The word “new” when deployed by marketing elves, is often a kind of smoke grenade designed to obscure if not completely hide an engineering and/or accounting truth that may not necessarily please the punters.

Consider “New Coke”, or the “New” Ford Edsel.  For a more cerebral example, consider “Newspeak” (“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words” – Orwell, 1984).

Thusly suspicious, I threw a pack on the scales to weigh them relative to their predecessors.  Marketing sleight-of-hand is good but it’s hard to hide “shrink-flation” from gravity.  I was relieved to see that whilst lighter, a pack was only 20 grams or so lighter which in the context of a pack weighing round 2.8kg ,is inconsequential.

My conclusion is that little or none of the absorptive material has fallen out of this “New Fit”.

Studying them more closely however, I saw that the sizing chart has changed substantially. 

The original “Large” Barry was advertised as being suitable for waists between 31.5 and 55”.  That’s a fairly large swathe of the human population right there.  Penguin or Polar Bear, it seems that the Barry “Large” was the product for you.

The “New Fit” Barry was offering a substantially-reduced sizing window of 33 – 42”.  Ergo, it would fit considerably fewer people.  Possibly me, but there was room for debate.

Funnily enough, my girth at my “man-kini” line is what counts here and there, 42” would be fine.  Go north to my belly button (where all my beer hides) and we are definitely a 44” and on a bad day, possibly more.  Still, I was now bumping at the very upper edge of Barry’s “New Fit” in Large.

Jumping the queue, I pulled out a “New Fit” Barry and resolved to try it out the next day.

At my morning change I discovered that whilst the core of the Barry appears to be largely the same, the plastic shell is both smaller and slightly differently shaped.  They DID still fit me but they were much tighter at the crotch and I no longer could wear them at their “minimum girth” landing zone marks (god knows what people down to the 31.5” end of old Barry’s size range were doing wearing them, presumably wandering around lost inside of them looking for the exits).

Barry and I survived a full, wet workday with dry jeans and none of the usual end-of-day Barry right rear thigh damp spot but that could as easily be the warmer weather as the “New Fit”.

I DID however fancy (and with a sample size of ONE to date, it’s little more than fancy) that at the end of the day, the “New Fit” Barry was a little tauter and less saggy in the bum department than the old one.  At the wrong end of a suitably-hydrated 12 hour shift, those old Barrys could easily get a bit “pendulous” in the lower crotch and bum department, doing their justly-famous impersonation of a pee-filled gondola swinging below a lard-balloon (more marketing pearls there).  I’ve often wondered before if this sagging may well have been exposing wet padding to nearby plastic pant elastics, provoking the 5 o’clock damp patches I’ve experienced.

So far so good.  The headline is “product NOT ruined despite NEW moniker”.  Time will tell though.  Stand by for more longitudinally-informed “New Fit” Barry opinions as I test some more…

[Little Sherri]

I've noted the "New" sizing of the Rearz products as well. I may have to jump up to an XL in their Lil' series - Monsters/Squirts/Bella's, whereas I was squarely an "L" for the last couple of years. Once upon a time, I even bought a case of Medium. Thanks, Covid. With tape-on diapers, though, you can kind of cheat, if you don't plan to take them off before they are consigned to the grave, because the tabs will stick anywhere, right out to the bitter edges, if you can't land them on the landing strip. Whereas with hook/loop systems, it depends on what the diaper cover is made of. Their Active Air diapers, with a rugged cloth backing, seem not to actually require the mesh landing area - the tabs are happy to adhere to any part of the diaper they make contact with. But on the Barry, the shell is plastic, so if you can't make the runway, you crash and burn. That observation caused me to order my Mermaid Tales in XL, even though by the waist charts, I should be in L territory. The problem is my upper legs, which bear a resemblance to embalmed dolphin torsos. I seem to be an asymmetric outlier in the relationship between my waist and my thigh diameters, or so every diaper and plastic pant I have purchased so far would lead me to believe. 

[oznl]

I ran a quick “pulse check” this weekend to test my bedwetting.

For some reason, I’d decided that I wasn’t wetting the bed anymore.  I’m not sure why I’d reached this conclusion.  My nappies were wet every morning and if anything, my recollection of wetting was limited to the point where I was wondering if I’d even used them.  It was only when I got out of bed and felt the sag that I realised they’d seen overnight action.

My  “gold standard” for detecting true (whilst asleep) bedwetting is rearranging my changing schedule so that I go to bed and fall asleep with an empty bladder and a known-to-be-dry nappy and check things again when I first wake. 

I don’t do this every day simply because it’s less efficient with respect to nappy-consumption, requiring an additional nappy to replace the already-somewhat-wet evening nappy before bed.  Cheaper and environmentally better to use my 2-super-nappy-per-day diet but the going-to-bed-already-wet thing does tend to obscure the evidence of bedwetting.

Weekends are easier for three-nappy-days because I can use cloth nappies which at least means that the cost of the extra change is negligible and I’m usually at home so changing is easier.

Anyway, it turns out that I DID wet the bed two out of the two consecutive nights that I tested for it.  Both nights I went to bed in a dry Babykins pull-up cloth nappy under plastic pants and both nights I woke to find myself mysteriously wet.

I’m not one of those people who ever seems to enjoy an unbroken night’s sleep.  It’s normal for me to wake for a while at around 2 – 3am, even on a good night.  On my “test” nights, before submerging back into sleep at this juncture, I remembered to have a prod around my nappy to see if there had been any action.  On both nights I was duly rewarded with a pee-wet finger.  On the first of those nights, it felt like I’d somewhat unusually, gone whilst laying on my side.  My nappy was wet on my left side down to my hip but the right side was still dry.  Had I been in a disposable, I would have cashed in on my terry-lined-waterproof pant insurance policy for sure.  I blame Shiraz for that one.  Too much Shiraz may also have been the reason that after the initial sleep-wetting event, I could dimly remember waking and weeing a bit a couple of times more through the night.  Note to brain:  this is a bit annoying.  I’m already wet so why bother waking me?

This fixed itself up on the second night.  I again woke at around 2:30am and found myself to be thoroughly wet.  I suspect I’d “been” more than once already.  I fell back asleep and remembered nothing more until it was time to get up and make some coffee.  Upon changing, I found 100% of my cloth nappy to be soaked.

The conclusion here is that I AM still bedwetting but that I’m losing insight into when it happens.  It’s there when I look for it but when I don’t look for it, I’m not aware it’s happening.

Both nights I could remember being slightly surprised to find myself “fail” the nappy finger-check (the weather is now too warm for me to reliably detect a wet nappy without a touch-test).  In my sleep-befuddled state, I initially rationalised to myself that it might just be sweat.  I could remember manually checking my nappy again, further afield only to discover that this “sweat” had soaked all the way through the front of my nappy to my plastic pants and spread considerably whilst simultaneously smelling like wee.

It is still a matter of some amazement to me that I’ve become a regular bedwetter even if I don’t always notice when it happens now.  Strange days.

[WBxx]

Welcome to my world.  Ten years ago it was only a dream, I never wet the bed.  Now (and for the last three or so years) I wet in my sleep roughly nine out of ten nights.  It’s a dream come true.

Come nightfall I look forward to bedtime.  Finally we’re there.  Empty bladder, tape on a diaper, plastic pant, pajamas and crawl into bed.  Sleep comes quickly.  Like you, I virtually always wake after a couple hours (end of first sleep cycle?) immediately checking down below … rarely dry.  Then back to sleep waking one or more times before morning with diaper growing as the night progresses.  It never gets old.

The big question, could I stop wetting the bed if so motivated.  I believe I could.  You?

[oznl]

14 hours ago, WBxx said:

Welcome to my world.  Ten years ago it was only a dream, I never wet the bed.  Now (and for the last three or so years) I wet in my sleep roughly nine out of ten nights.  It’s a dream come true.

I'm honestly not sure what the frequency of my bedwetting is.  Obviously there was at least TWO consecutive nights last week but alcohol was involved on both of those nights.

I'm a bit over 3.5 years in on the 24/7 caper.  I believe that bedwetting started to appear very rarely towards the end of year #1 and probably plateaued as possibly a once or twice per week thing for quite some time.  I get the sense that things upticked markedly around the year 3 milestone.

Can you remember where you were developmentally at 3.5 years?  I'm always curious to see if how consistent this experience is.

 

14 hours ago, WBxx said:

The big question, could I stop wetting the bed if so motivated.  I believe I could.  You?

I don’t know. 

Not so long ago, I would have told you that I COULD.  This conclusion reflected my general pessimism about re-training in this way.  I assumed that I was probably awake when those “bedwetting” events occurred, just not awake enough to remember the next morning.  Ipso facto, a decision NOT to pee in bed would similarly manifest.  I’d just get up to pee like a grown up.

I think for some period of time this may have been possible but I now suspect that ship has sailed.

The proof of this pudding for me was when I found that I would wet the bed even if I had resolved NOT to and, reinforcing this decision, had gone to bed WITHOUT a nappy.  It was a cold, wet night that I could have done without.

Additional proof appeared when I realised that my bedwetting no longer confines itself to “safe” circumstances.   I recently wet the bed whilst at a hotel for the first time since “before COVID”.  The hotel bed was well protected but I was quite surprised that it had happened.  I’d expected the general intensity and low-level stress surrounding the large familial event underway would see my subconscious on  the same page as my conscious and I'd remain dry at night or at least, be awake to "manage" such wetting events that may be necessary.   Nope…  I woke with an empty bladder and a thoroughly wet nappy the next morning regardless.  Reinforcing this was that @Little Sherri recently experienced a near-identical event whilst sharing a hotel room with friends.  Despite the fact that his subconscious was most likely not keen on a bedwetting event since he was in very close company with peers with enormous embarrassment potential, a bedwetting event duly occurred anyway.

This thing does seem to have slipped beyond my grasp and has a life of its own. 

I’m not sure how I’d go about “stopping” it because I don’t know what it is that I’m doing that starts it.  It just happens now.

[Little Sherri]

6 hours ago, oznl said:

Despite the fact that his subconscious was most likely not keen on a bedwetting event since he was in very close company with peers with enormous embarrassment potential, a bedwetting event duly occurred anyway.

This thing does seem to have slipped beyond my grasp and has a life of its own. 

I agree wholeheartedly. If there was ever a time when I did NOT want to wet the bed, it was while sharing a room with a buddy... while also staying at a hotel that had been booked by a buddy who worked for the hotel chain. He became immediately friendly with the management at all of the locations we stayed at, even helping one of them troubleshoot their front-desk software when something wasn't working while they were trying to check in a basketball team. So, I always had it in the back of my mind that a soaked mattress could end up "on the radar", and not be wiped off the board with a tip on the dresser. I did not set out to wet the bed, and I wet it twice. Ergo, that aspect of my continence has somewhat escaped my conscious control. 

[WBxx]

17 hours ago, oznl said:

Can you remember where you were developmentally at 3.5 years?  I'm always curious to see if how consistent this experience is.

Don’t have to remember.  Each morning I record wet/dry and more for later analysis/questions.  For going to sleep dry and waking wet with no memory in total for year three I was a bit over 30%.  And year four it was slightly more than 40%.  This is with no alcohol but with a bit of encouragement from wearing and a glass of water before bed.  Believe your “development” pretty much coincides with mine.

[oznl]

This week I had one of those nights that gave me reason to be parading around the house at 3am.

Once again, the electrical gremlins are visiting…  In Australia, domestic household power circuits are, by law, governed by an RCD (Residual Current Device), paradoxically renamed by Government as an “Earth Leakage Detector”.  The job of the RCD is to exchange the remote risk of a swift and brutal electrocution due to mains electricity appearing where it shouldn’t with an ongoing nuisance of occasional false-triggers from everything including poorly designed European refrigerators (I’m talking about YOU Smeg) or suicidal geckoes deciding to end it all in a blaze of glory by marching across an Air Conditioner power supply PCB.

The RCD had already tripped once during the day.  I’d rather hoped it was a once off and not a prelude to some multi-visit electrician festival where a series of people spend a series of call-out fees attempting to isolate which appliance must be expensively replaced.

Sometime after bed however, I was woken to a curious silence in the room.  All was dark, even the clock radio.  The ceiling fan (on an unprotected lighting circuit) however continued to spin.

The RCD had tripped again.  At 3am.  Sigh…

Why am I such a light sleeper that a simple power outage wakes me?  I didn’t get any answer at all from my beloved because she was snoring gently alongside me.

RCDs don’t reset themselves and the contents of my beer refrigerator wouldn’t be betting any colder.

Reluctantly, I got up, descended the stairs, found a torch, dissuaded the family cat from her opinion that it must be breakfast time and went outside to spend some quality time at the household fuse box persuading the RCD to reset and stay reset.

Some minutes later, I trudged back inside, torch in hand to discover my beloved and daughter were up, woken not so much by the absence of electricity but by the parade of appliances in the house re-initialising themselves in a 21st century fanfare of beeps, flashing LEDs and calibration noises brought on by the resumption of power.  They appeared (with questions) in the gloom at the top of the staircase as I appeared at the bottom of it.

“It’s ok” I said.  “Just the earth leakage detector again taking the power out, I’ve reset it.  It’s back for now”.

It was only then, as I stopped to consider their near-silhouette appearance at the top of the stairs that I considered my present attire.   As it had been an “alcohol” night, I was in a BetterDry, a booster pad and on top of that, a voluminously-bulky pair of double-layer-terry-towel-lined, white plastic pants.  There was a thin black pair of short pyjama pants stretched taut over them but these left little to the imagination.  To make matters worse, possible due to it being an alcohol night as mentioned, the pee fairies had visited and I was a bit saggy.

As a self-taught bedwetter, I don’t muck around with respect to my night nappies.  They’re engineered for business, not pleasure and under the covers, their infantile bulk is as irrelevant to me as their leak-stopping prowess is poignant.

Outside the visual refuge of bed covers, I was a LONG way from visually subtle.

All of the attention however was about the swift resumption of electricity.  Furthermore, it was quite dark (by now, 3:30am), I was partially obscured by a stair banister and the pyjama pants pulled over the bulk of my gear were similarly black.  Obviously, my beloved is only too well aware of my preferences in night attire.  It was the daughter that was the problem.  I convinced them to go back to bed, dissuaded the cat about feeding and waddled back to bed.  I THINK I got away with it.

It could have been worse.  If it’s truly warm weather, I sometimes won’t bother with those in bed.  I don’t need the extra insulation.  I just sleep in a nappy, simultaneously reducing MY temperature whilst increasing the temperature of an annoyed beloved sleeping beside me.   I’d like to think that I’d have the presence of mind to pull on some camouflage pants before departing the bedroom but my experience is that good judgement rarely appears at the instant of being abruptly woken at 3am.

Back in bed of course then, my old curse of “Well, you’ve stood up and walked around now so it MUST be morning” kicked in.  I lay in bed waiting for the birdsong to start and then another 90 minutes before the electricity-enabled clock radio kicked in with the news.  If nothing else, this reminded me about one of the really good things about wearing nappies to bed: not having to get up.