Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

And so my long, comfortable run of uninterrupted bedwetting came to a close through the usual vector of me poking at it…

I’d gone to bed having first changed into a dry cloth nappy.  The mere act of changing before bed and consequentially falling asleep “dry” is known to me to be an inhibitor for subsequent sleep wetting but I’d thought (incorrectly it seems) I was completely past such vulnerabilities at this stage in my journey.  I’d had enough successful “fall asleep dry, wake up at 2am mysteriously wet” events under my plastic pants to make light of it.

The pre-bed change was as much driven by operational necessity as it was by curiosity.  I’d been in an old “DPF Velcro diaper with extra padding”.  Whilst notionally absorbent, I’ve found these ancient cloth diaper designs to be notoriously as happy to release pee as to absorb it.  Compression leaks are common and even standing up in a well-used DPF Diaper can often result in a pee-puddle forming in the crotch of my plastic pants (my DPF was already at this stage).  Best to switch to some Babykins cotton/terry pull ups.  I did, and put myself to bed fully expecting my bladder to switch to “automatic” and deliver me 8 hours of glorious, if slightly humid sleep.

I duly woke at 1:30am to find myself depressingly dry.  I was aware at that point that I could have easily wet my nappy a little but instead, I decided to remain dry and try to fall back asleep to see if the bedwetting fairies might visit later.

That trick NEVER works for me.

Instead, my full-ish bladder woke me at 3:20am.  There was no chance of falling back asleep without some bladder relief by this point so I went ahead and wet myself whilst laying there awake.  As a kind of knock-on punishment for my tactical blunder in deferring the inevitable until it woke me, I ended up remaining awake in that soggy terry towelling until nearly 5am.

I then fell asleep heavily.  I can vaguely recall a “pee” dream where I realised I was in already-wet pants and it was ok to pee but any evidence to how that may have materialised in waking-world was obscured by me being thoroughly wet to begin with.

It continues to be for me that the best way to wet the bed is to not plan to do so.

For the preceding fortnight, I’d given no further thought to my nappies than a cursory checklist that they could survive the night without getting the bedding wet before I retired.  In this mode, I enjoyed weeks of empty-bladdered mornings and largely uninterrupted sleep.

Now I have to find my way back there…

[oznl]

Early Sunday morning was spent by our sheets in the washing machine and spent by me in the doghouse.

Yes, gather round and hear the soggy tale of how I wet the bed.  Not just my nappy, no, the actual bed:  with my beloved laying in it next to me.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

On the upside, I’m slightly surprised that I’ve made it through nearly 4 years of 24/7 nappies including transitioning to regular involuntary bedwetting without doing this already, at least doing it to the extent where it could not be concealed from her (at least in my possibly-distorted world view).

On another upside, my previous attempts to level with her about that now non-discretionary nature of my night nappies were shut down so vigorously that it had remained ambiguous to me if she’d actually comprehended the news.  I’m pretty sure this matter has now been resolved in the affirmative.

It all started unsurprisingly, the night before.  Slightly miffed at Friday’s sleepless bedwetting fail (I’d gone to bed in a dry nappy to see what happened and found all that happened was insomnia) I’d resolved to go back to carefree nappy usage on Saturday.  After a pleasant afternoon culminating in an early evening dip in the pool, I’d showered and surveying the nappy stash, decided that a heavy duty cloth nappy would be fine from 6:30pm until Sunday morning.

I duly pinned myself into a thick, kite-folded terry nappy before hauling up plastic pants and donning a compression pant over the lot to hold it in place.  Over this, cheap polyester shorts stretched taut over padding, plastic and pins.  The dim light of evening should conceal my bulk.

Then ensued an evening of beer, wine and YouTube.

In keeping with my carefree strategy, I paid no heed to my nappy.   It didn’t matter right?  I was wet when I went to bed but I couldn’t tell you how wet.  I hadn’t given it a thought.  I fell asleep clad only in my nappy, plastic pants and some pyjama shorts over the top giving my beloved the opportunity to pretend that I was a grown up.

Suddenly, it was 3:10am.

It was a warm night, probably about 24C.  Consequentially, my beloved had set the ceiling fan to “Cyclonic”.  This, and some evidence of hangover (albeit blunted by abundant hydration) lent the room a certain “Apocalypse Now” air.

I was puzzled at how cold my thighs felt.

This was because they were wet and additionally, were being evaporatively cooled by wet pyjama pants under an over-enthusiastic ceiling fan.

Shite.

I prodded around.  I could feel the sheet was wet beneath me.  There were still a few dry bits on my pyjamas so that was potentially good news.  Trying not to draw attention to myself, I continued tactile surveying with my fingertips.  The outside of my plastic pants seemed ok but it also seemed that I was leaking out of both leggings.

Inserting fingers beneath damp leg elastics, I cautiously pushed ominously-saturated terry towelling nappy back up and away from by plastic pant seams.  My working assumption was that my leaks were due to wet terry towelling poking past those seams, wicking moisture into my pyjama pants and on to the bed.

Positioning myself carefully onto my back, I then, optimistically, tried to fall back asleep.

45 minutes later, still trying to fall asleep, I needed to pee.  So I did.  Lightning doesn’t strike twice right?

55 minutes later I realised that now my back felt wet too.  More nocturnal prodding revealed that in addition to the wet patch under my bum originating at my plastic pant leggings, a secondary wet patch had appeared at the small of my back, presumably from the rear waist elastic.

Double shite.

I tried laying on my side.

My wet pyjamas stuck to my thighs, chilled nicely by the roaring fan and I could feel a distinct “squish” from between my legs as I rolled over precipitating a fresh burst of wetness at the tops of my legs.  I wasn’t leaking due to wicking.  I was leaking because my nappy was drenched and could hold no more.

I could also smell faintly, fresh pee.  I’ve NO idea where it all came from.  No, that’s not quite true.  I’ve got a FAIR idea where it all came from but it was like that I’d been saving it up since the previous Thursday and it all came at once.  I’ve never see that much pee outside of a barnyard.

My beloved snored on.

There was no chance of sleep.  Every time I moved things got worse and it seemed like I had to pee a little every 15 minutes which also made things even worser (“worser is not really a word I know but it’s a construct I need grammatically right now to get where I need to go.  If Shakespeare can do it, so can I).   

This nappy had given up the ghost.  Whatever went in, came out.  I was by now thoroughly cold, wet, uncomfortable and tormented by the knowledge that every move I made was further eroding my already-questionable chances of hiding my nocturnal misdeed and I was highly likely to get into trouble.

At 5am I got out of bed.  It seemed madness to remain there.  This of course caused my beloved to wake.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t sleep.  It’s pointless laying here.  I’m going to get up for a while”.

Yep, don’t mention the piss puddle.

Amazingly, she accepted this explanation without further comment, promptly going back to sleep.  I forlornly wondered if since she was clearly dry, things were still recoverable.

Leaving the room I went downstairs.  This caused the cat to become wildly optimistic at the chances of an early breakfast.  She retreated at my “If I had a shovel you’d be a mess on the tiles right now” glare as I made a beeline for the downstairs bathroom instead to review my sartorial state.

Surveying myself in the mirror my heart sank.  My pyjama pants weren’t damp, they were soaked-shiny and stuck wetly to my legs.  This meant our bed wasn’t damp, it was soaked too.

I decided to change my nappy.  This one clearly wasn’t doing anything anymore.  Freed from plastic pants, it directly and wetly slid down my legs to hit the floor with a faint thud.  I didn’t even need to unpin it.  It was completely pee-logged.  I’d drowned it.  I had no idea how much pee I’d put into it and at 5:20am on a Sunday morning, I had little enthusiasm to find out.  I dropped it into the washing machine along with my plastic pants.  Returning to my study, I pulled out a next-to-useless “Dailee Slip” medical-diaper-designed-by-accountants and taped it on as insurance.  It should at least last the 2 – 3 hours before official “morning” and a change into something more substantial.

I realised I was tired.  I was wearing a Dailee-slip pee-bandaid, the only pair of pyjama pants this side of my beloved was pee-soaked, and 4 meters down a hall, my beloved was snoring in the better half of a cold wet bed.

Figuring that I was unlikely to make the bed any wetter, I pulled on my cold wet pyjama pants up over my fresh nappy to at least hide things before returning down the hall to creep into bed.

At the opening of our bedroom door my beloved stirred again.  She rolled over and as she did, I saw the outline of her arm beneath the covers flop languidly out across to my side of the bed.

Treble shite….

Sure enough, after a brief pause, I saw a certain amount of cover moving that suggested beneath, some exploratory groping was now taking place across on the swampy side of the marital bed.

“The bed’s all wet” she announced flatly, still somewhat asleep.

“Yeah, I leaked a bit.   It’s only a damp spot”.

Silence.  She was still half asleep and amazingly, it seemed that she wasn’t awake enough yet to fully process the implications of her recent discovery.

There was nothing else I could say.  I clambered back into the “damp spot”.  A snorkel would have helped.  Instantly the complete infeasibility of concealing this faux pas became evident.  Everything was completely soaked on my side.  My wet, cold pyjamas stuck to my thighs and wet sheets siphoned away any body heat not already extracted by my wet pants. 

I know there are people who love this.  I’m not one of them.  I find it stunningly difficult to sleep in a wet bed.

Eventually, I fell into a fitful doze.  At some point I wet my dailee slip.  I did that whilst laying on my side.  Normally that would be a suicidally foolish choice with such a pathetic nappy but at this point I just didn’t care.  The bed was soaked anyway and I didn’t enjoy the experience of my back laying on cold wet bedding.  The irony lost on the “Daily Slip maxi”, it held the wee in anyway.

Suddenly she was sitting up in bed beside me.  It was 8am and evidently time to start Sunday.

“So what happened last night?”

“Well, my nappy leaked.  I was asleep.  You might remember me telling you that I’d stopped being reliably dry at night a couple of years ago.  Well, alcohol makes that worse and last night it made it a lot worse.  I’ve never flooded a cloth nappy like that before.”

That was a true enough statement but she was sitting in a bed n stony silence whilst I was laying in a bed in a tangle of cool, pee-wet sheets beside her.  There was an asymmetry of credibility.

“I haven’t had a dry night for quite a while.  I think we need some alcohol-free nights.  I’ve never overwhelmed a cloth nappy like that before”.

This was true.  Since SHE is the principle proponent of “wine time”, perhaps this revelation would reflect some of the heat.  In some obscure way, this might be HER fault.

“Get up, I need to strip the bed”.

“It’s just a damp spot, it will be ok”

“No it won’t”.

She was correct of course.  In terms of cinematic experience, this bed was “Waterworld”, not “Dune”.

“I’ll do it.  I made this mess.  I’ll clean it up”.

Virtually ejecting her from the room, I stripped the bed alone.  On my side, there was a darkly visible 2’ x 2’ wet spot.  There, the bottom sheet and cotton mattress protector were pee-soaked down to the waterproof sheet beneath.  The bed smelled of pee.  So did I for that matter.   There was no way it could have been “ok”.   I washed the sheets.  Then I washed me.  Then I put on a proper nappy, discarding the untrustworthy and uncomfortable “Dailee Slip Maxi”.  In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered with it and just peed straight into the bedding.  It would not have been substantially worse.

My mistake of course was not to change immediately at 3am.  In my effort to fly my little problem under her metaphorical radar, I’d simply made it a much bigger one.  It was possible that the 3am leak was survivable but that nappy was obviously toast.  By 5am however, I had managed to upgrade the issue to being a full on wet bed on my hands, or, to be more precise, beneath me.  I should have gotten up, owned the problem and admitted I needed a midnight nappy change and wear the hostility as I would wear my nappy: like a man. 

Doubtless I would have marinated in her displeasure but as experience has since shown me, the alternative was to marinate in both her displeasure and cold pee.

She was sipping coffee on our rear deck as I walked out carrying a damp but freshly washed mattress protector and sheets to hang out to dry.

I rolled my eyes, a mute acknowledgement of the ludicrous back-story to my self-inflicted predicament.  She looked at me and snorted with laughter, spraying atomised coffee over our outdoor table.   In a sense though, I could see that she was laughing WITH me more than AT me.  Presumably at the ludicrous situation I’d engineered us into.

I knew then she’d get over it.

[Stroller]

Ouch.  I'm amazed it's not happened here, but it hasn't, at least not since a couple of small damp spots early on in my wearing at night, when I was still sorting out how to make an overnight nappy reasonably leakproof.  Admittedly, I've got a pretty standard routine, which doesn't involve a lot of fluid intake in the evening.

Still, it could have been worse - you've not been banished to the shed.

[NoIllDL]

@oznl I am barely worthy to stand in your nappied shadow:  In the cooler months I wear maybe 75% of the time.  Similar to you I am married to a vanilla woman.  Unlike your experience--at least until some of your more recent positive(ish) experiences--my wife has always been tolerant of my "thing," including our time between the sheets. 

For most of the past four years you have described your beloved's attitude as being hostile, or at very least, passive-aggressive toward your nappied self.  My question:  Do you have intimate relations with your wife?  If so, how do you get around your weakened continence?  I imagine your beloved would be considerably less than pleased if you leaked before, during, or after intercourse.

[oznl]

3 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

@oznl I am barely worthy to stand in your nappied shadow:

Aww, I’ll get all embarrassed.  I’m just a disinhibited odd-ball with a keyboard and if I don’t lay off the Christmas beer, wine and nibbles soon you’ll be able to park a Volkswagen in my “nappied shadow”.

3 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

Unlike your experience--at least until some of your more recent positive(ish) experiences--my wife has always been tolerant of my "thing," including our time between the sheets. 

For most of the past four years you have described your beloved's attitude as being hostile, or at very least, passive-aggressive toward your nappied self. 

To be honest, it is one hell of an ask for a partner to put up with this.  There certainly has been hostility and passive-aggression but that's just one facet of the relationship.  In other dimensions, we get on very well.  The reason that I have covered this is my wish to convey the full picture of my story.  This is documentary, not fantasy.  Partners DO struggle with this frequently and life doesn't turn into a porno film that way it so often does in ABDL literature.  I need to be clear that she is not at all a bad person and I'm very glad to share my life with her.  It's just a shame that one aspect of my life she finds problematic.

3 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

My question:  Do you have intimate relations with your wife?  If so, how do you get around your weakened continence?  I imagine your beloved would be considerably less than pleased if you leaked before, during, or after intercourse.

I need to tread carefully here.  I’ve claimed the right to speak for myself with agonising frankness but I cannot transfer that right to my beloved.  She would want, and deserves her anonymity so I’ll confine myself to very high level detail.

“Relations” did persist in one form or another for some time into the 24/7 thing although it became increasingly obvious that the nappies were an inhibiting factor for this.  Another inhibiting factor was my own decreasing level of interest and (more agonising frankness), decreasing level of ability.  A year or two ago this loss of interest appeared to sharply accelerate.  Whether this was because of my persistent nappy use or her own menopause (which hit her harder than she expected), or some combination of the two is unclear to me.  It isn’t something she has volunteered discussion on and I haven’t pursued it.  I don’t really miss it and we get on very well despite the nappy-friction.  Physically, she loves a cuddle and doesn’t seem to care about my nappies enough for them to put her off that.

It would be possible for me to strip off long enough for some party time if she really wanted it (I don't know that I do but I'd make an effort for her).  The first logistical challenge would be that it would be highly likely I'd be at least slightly wet and she'd want me to shower.   I doubt I would leak but I would need to assiduously re-nappy myself on completion if there was a chance I would fall asleep.  That's probably not a visual she would find romantic at all.  In any case she hasn’t sent any kind of "party time" signal and in this day and age, it would be inappropriate for me to pursue her.

[NoIllDL]

Quote

This is documentary, not fantasy.  Partners DO struggle with this frequently and life doesn't turn into a porno film that way it so often does in ABDL literature. 

Indeed.  My wife is a saint to have put up with me for nearly 40 years.  We still enjoy a good "cuddle" and the coals of passion are still there even if the teenage bonfire has subsided.

[oznl]

11 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

Indeed.  My wife is a saint to have put up with me for nearly 40 years.  We still enjoy a good "cuddle" and the coals of passion are still there even if the teenage bonfire has subsided.

Exactly that!!

[Little Sherri]

Wow, @oznl, you managed to enact one of my persistent, enuresis-inhibitory bad dreams. I have dampened the sheets on occasion due to product misapplication, product failure, or, most commonly, user error, but, I have not put myself in the position where the bedding has been laid to waste and my beloved has noticed it herself.

The worst thing I can possibly do is wake her up, because she takes a pharmacy worth of medications at night, some of which render her groggy, some of which make it harder for her to sleep, so, she flits between insomnia and coma, and if she's actually sleeping deeply, it's a crime worthy of trial at The Hague, to wake her up. That's one of the reasons I sleep with pacifiers. I started out just wanting to play around with them, maybe test my AB tendencies, but quickly noticed that it stopped her from elbowing me violently an hour after I fell asleep, because I was "clicking" my teeth. I have a bite guard for tooth grinding, but that only makes the noise worse. A pacifier has solved the problem completely, so while she'd probably pop a bottle of champaign if I told her I was done with this diaper thing, the pacifiers are now written into our marriage contract. She reminds me to bring one when we pack to travel. 

All of which is to say, that if I had to get up and remake the bed at 4 AM or whenever the crime occurred, she'd be as pissed off as the bed was pissed on. 

Usually, a decent cloth nappy can take a licking and keep on ticking - you must have really backed it into a corner! I applaud your liver. 

[oznl]

The thing that I was GOING to update about last week, before I somewhat dramatically comprehensively soaked the sheets (with her in them) was my Christmas present.  My beloved bought me a new smart watch.

Despite being a professional nerd, I’m not really the “latest gadgets” kind of guy.  I buy a new phone when it stops getting Android security updates or, more likely, irreplaceable battery decay.   I already had a smartwatch AND it was one she’d given me.  It just needed a new battery.  The little lithium iron button cell was now so weak that it resembled the family cat:  mostly asleep, could be roused to wakefulness but it wouldn’t last.

I asked for a new battery.  She pointed out that my current smart watch was at least 5 years old and probably powered by coal.  She bought me a Galaxy Pro 5.

It tracks sleep.

I wet the bed but I’m largely confused about when it happens.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

It quickly became clear however that this watch, as smart as it was, wasn’t monitoring brain waves.  As near as I can tell, it uses some combination of pulse, blood oxygen saturation and movement to infer sleep and stages of sleep.  This seems a bit of a tall order to me.

With about two weeks of data under its black silicon belt however, it’s certainly generated credible looking graphs.

The “deep sleep” phase looks to me to be about correct.  It typically occurs in the first one third of the night before roughly alternating phases of light and REM sleep, interspersed with very thin slivers of wakefulness (which I suspect might be tossing or turning in bed: something I am prone to).  In strict accordance with my insomnia, those all-too-frequent nights that include lying awake studying the ceiling fan usually show up as well.

I’ve no idea about the REM sleep claims but I do note that lying in bed very still whilst awake, trying to FALL asleep can, in the early hours, when my pulse is slow, get conflated with “ light sleep” when I know I’m NOT lightly asleep.  It tends to confuse ‘light sleep’ with ‘I wish I WAS asleep’.

Drawing conclusions on sleep patterns with a smart watch can probably be compared to attempting gas chromatography with a laser pointer and a magnifying glass but whatever…

What I can’t help but notice however is that there are reliable spikes in wakefulness in the “pee zone’ times: 1-2am and 3-5am.  Sometimes these spikes are substantive.  Sometimes however, they are incredibly small.  Some other times, I tumble straight from deep sleep up into the briefest blip in the direction of wakefulness (perhaps just transitioning directly out of wherever I am into a light sleep stage) at or around a time where I’m statistically likely to pee.  I’m wondering if these occasions are where I actually partially rouse myself by the sensation of getting wet.

One night where I had a 100% vector on sleep wetting (I’d gone to bed dry), I cross checked myself against the sleep tracker knowing full well that I had sleep-wet somewhere between 11pm and 2am.  I could clearly see where I’d woken up at 2am, found myself wet and had a bit of a grope around to make sure all was well (it was).  I could remember doing that.  What the app told me that I could NOT remember was that half an hour or so earlier, there’d been a tiny, brief-but-anomalous spike up in my sleep level to not-quite-conscious from the deep sleep I’d been in before I promptly fell back down the sleep hole.

I’m wondering if these faint pings are data-driven evidence of the precise points where pee hits padding.  The science continues.

[Little Sherri]

Intriguing. My wife gave one of those things a few years ago but it didn’t like me. It was a Fitbit, so maybe belonging to the likes of me was insulting to it. Although I did run and practice martial arts with some frequency back then; perhaps not vigorously enough to impress it. But I tended to take it off at night, although it claimed to track sleep. I’m not used to sleeping with a watch on.

My beloved, though, studies her sleep graphs with a keen eye, sometimes pointing out where I was snoring (she also snores, but I don’t point it out, because doing so does not improve my lot in life), or, she uses it as evidence for why it’s my turn to drive our daughter to school.

I’ve often wondered what mix of science and marketing alchemy is used to generate the “data”, because I used to look at EEG readouts in school sometimes, and I know you can’t get those from your wrist.

She’s been campaigning to get me an Apple Watch for my upcoming birthday, because she thinks that then, I will no longer have an excuse to delay returning her texts (I’ll find one). I haven’t exactly run into the open arms of the idea, but, now I see a yellow-tinged lining to it. Nappy science. 

[oznl]

On 1/18/2023 at 2:37 AM, Little Sherri said:

Wow, @oznl, you managed to enact one of my persistent, enuresis-inhibitory bad dreams. I have dampened the sheets on occasion due to product misapplication, product failure, or, most commonly, user error, but, I have not put myself in the position where the bedding has been laid to waste and my beloved has noticed it herself.

Yeah.  I know that sort of scenario is a fantasy for some folk but honestly for me, it was just embarrassing and uncomfortably wet.  I have no desire to repeat it.

On 1/18/2023 at 2:37 AM, Little Sherri said:

Usually, a decent cloth nappy can take a licking and keep on ticking - you must have really backed it into a corner! I applaud your liver. 

Exactly.  Although, I suspect that nappy in question may have been one of the older ones and they are noticeably more threadbare than they used to be.  I can sense some capital outlay in the mid-term future.

4 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

She’s been campaigning to get me an Apple Watch for my upcoming birthday, because she thinks that then, I will no longer have an excuse to delay returning her texts (I’ll find one). I haven’t exactly run into the open arms of the idea, but, now I see a yellow-tinged lining to it. Nappy science. 

I've never been a fan of the Apple walled garden (not that Android is wildly superior but at least there is some vendor competitive pressure).  This may have been compounded by the trauma I suffered dealing with my beloved's iPhone and the dysfunctional bloatware parody of itself that I-tunes had, Elvis-Presley-like, descended into.

Having said that, the whole telemetry/tracking thing on a Smartwatch is kind of cool, Apple or otherwise.  I'd say "go for it".

My beloved's habit of persistently texting me whilst she knows I'm driving is truly irritating.  I wish she'd find some less obtuse way of attempting to kill me.

[Stroller]

7 hours ago, oznl said:

Drawing conclusions on sleep patterns with a smart watch can probably be compared to attempting gas chromatography with a laser pointer and a magnifying glass but whatever…

I can't help but conclude your watch is overthinking all this...

[oznl]

I’ve been a study in bi-modal peeing this last week.  It seems like my body has only two settings.

1.       Store fluid like a hoarder storing magazines: stacking every nook, cranny and crevasse inside the meat-cage I call my body with pee and leaving me changing only-30%-used nappies irrespective of the quantity of beer I drank the previous evening or day.

1.       Pee extravagantly and continuously as though channeling some kind of agricultural irrigation infrastructure and plumbed into some ineffable and undrainable cosmic pee reservoir

I don’t understand how it’s possible to drink 4 cans of beer with friends, wash it down with nearly a bottle of red wine and wake up in a boosted BetterDry that’s only slightly wet.

Conversely, I don’t understand how it’s possible to spend the day working in an unairconditioned warehouse bench repair facility in 30C/70% humidity and still finish the day in a bloated, all-but-leaking Barry that was every bit as wet as my t-shirt was.

It’s like the causality between input and output has gotten broken somewhere.

Yesterday, I greeted the 6am dawn to discover that I’d cashed-in on the Babykins terry-lined plastic pants insurance policy that I’d worn to bed over my booster-enabled BetterDry.  It’s not uncommon for the Babykins to catch a few small dribbles here and there that seem to be the almost-inevitable outcome of grown-up-sized disposable nappies worn (and used) in bed but this was more than a few dribbles.  Not only was the BetterDry soaked, my terry liner was similarly soaked.  It stuck wetly to me as though it had been my primary night nappy rather than the outerwear safety net it was supposed to be.

This soggy garment created a minor logistical issue.  For some reason, I feel amazingly awkward about dealing with “out of band” ad hoc nappy maintenance in front of my beloved.  It was this very reticence that led me to ignore a painfully obvious need for a midnight nappy change the other week (another outcome of erratic pee volumes) allowing it to morph into a full on wet bed.

Although today’s bed remained mercifully dry, my terry/plastic pants were pee soaked.  You could have wrung them out.  They needed to be washed but of course, nappy infrastructure wash day was not a Tuesday.  So I put them up on a shelf at the top of the walk-in-robe and hoped that they would dry out enough across the working day to lie in state with some degree of social acceptability until wash day.

They didn’t dry of course.  They were too wet and although the day was 31C, it was also about 70% humidity – similar climatic conditions to those found inside my nappy that morning.  I returned from work to discover not only wet plastic/terry pants but a walk in robe that smelt like a one day old wet nappy.  Funny about that.

I vented the room and relocated the by-now-offensive plastic pants to hide in my workshop until washday. 

I’ve gone into cloth early this week as Thursday is a public holiday here in Australia and I don’t work Fridays anyway. 

Once again my bladder’s caprice frolicked.

My workday Barry was only moderately wet.  Similarly moderately wet was the afternoon-shift old Molicare I had laying around before changing into two layers of Babykins cloth pull-on nappies and plastic pants for bed.

I woke at 2:41am and realised that I needed a pee.  I felt dry and naturally assumed that I’d failed at bedwetting Wednesday night.  As I’m aware that I’m not very good at telling if I’m wet or dry these days, I had a feel inside my nappy anyway and was slightly surprised to find myself thoroughly wet already.  Evidently, I’d had a long, dreamless wee sometime between 10:30pm and 2:41am, possibly more than one.  I was wet right around the corner to my bum.  This left me slightly concerned about peeing again but my first rule about peeing is that pee happens and so it did.

I needn’t have worried.  My dysfunctional bladder urges (such as they appear these days) seem to bear little relationship to bladder fullness.  There wasn’t much more pee at all and the Babykins cloth nappies effortlessly made it through until morning change keeping the sheets dry.

Now my workshop smells of wet nappy.  My beloved never goes there though.  It is the domain of men (just me), tools and spiders.  In any case it’s washing day tomorrow.  If this erratic bladder thing continues I might have to reconsider my diapering cadence – something that has been stable for past couple of years.

[Little Sherri]

9 hours ago, oznl said:

It is the domain of men (just me), tools and spiders. 

Mine as well, but our spiders have been so abused by subzero temperatures and a near-total absence of food supply for half the year, that they're reticent, meek things, and I mock people here who are afraid of them. Yours are notably larger and feature the latest in chemical weaponry. Nobody loses a fight to a spider in Canada. In Australia, there are spiders  running around with teardrop face tattoos. 

[oznl]

After a curiously cool spring and summer (by Queensland standards, nobody was ever going to be looking for coats or ice scrapers), our more sauna-like summer climate has decided that it was better to make a late appearance than never.

We are in a “heat wave”.  You can tell this by the conga-line of Government officials on the TV news exhorting us not to use our air conditioners because it’s very hot.  This is the kind of logic that makes sense if you’re a cost-cutting bureaucrat that has fashioned a state electricity grid is designed more around the principles of good luck rather than those of good electrical engineering.

Whatever.

This is my fifth “hot season” in nappies and either heat-related nerve damage has dulled my senses or I’m getting used to it.  Whilst I’d never describe wearing an extra 1” thick layer of padding and plastic as an optimal strategy for avoiding heat stroke, it does somehow seem slightly less hideous than with previous summers.  I must also accept the possibility that having worn nothing but nappies for years now, they just seem “normal” and this is why I’m not obsessed about tearing them off and going to roll in some snow.  It might just be that I’ve forgotten what “not hideous” feels like.

Such is the intensity of the gravitational pull that attracts people such as us, I persist with them anyway and the usual nappy-related hint that the heat is on is there.  No matter how much I seem to drink, my nappies are coping effortlessly.

Thusly, I managed to squeeze a full 24 hours out of a Rearz “Mermaid Tale” this week.

It wasn’t really a planned thing but it ended up being a thing anyway.

Saturday night we were to give a dinner party which is a cue for me to cook.

At around 4:30pm, I showered and changed into a Mermaid, this be the kind of super-nappy that I thought might cope with an evening of beer and wine without me having to change again before bed and yet have me wake up with dry bedding for Sunday.

The day was, as you might expect for late January, hot and oppressive.  Although the sun had gone down by dinner, it was still 30C and the 80% humidity made standing over a 6 burner BBQ a particularly joyless experience.

Hydration is important but as fast as I could drink beer, it seemingly evaporated.

I didn’t track things that well but by the time our guests and left and bedtime had rolled around, I was damp rather than wet and so I skipped changing (as planned) and went to bed. 

I woke with an empty bladder by morning but to my surprise, although I was wetter than the night before, I was a long way from soaked. I’ve no idea what happened overnight.  I just don’t remember.  That’s often the case these days after alcohol.  I probably wet the bed.

The Mermaid was dry enough that I decided to skip the morning nappy change as well and deal with it later.  Despite my working assumption that my beloved studiously ignores any and every aspect of my nappies, she’d clearly detected the disturbance in the force when I followed her downstairs for breakfast with unusual promptness for a Sunday.

“Did you have a shower?” she asked, glancing at my crotch nervously.  “Shower” in her parlance was clearly code for “Nappy change”.

“Nope” I replied brightly.  “I’m not that wet, I’ll deal with it after breakfast”.

There ensued a more lingering glance whereby she intently studied crotch, presumably looking for evidence of escaping pee.   I suspect this was more about concern for the furniture’s welfare than mine but nothing was said.

Breakfast came and went and I STILL wasn’t that wet.  It seemed SUCH a waste to consign such a noble garment to an early grave.

Unsurprisingly, it was another oppressive day.  Only 32C but with dewpoints at 24C and no relief from thunderstorms as the dark clouds came and went pointlessly as I tried intermittent bursts of yard work interspersed with long periods flopped in front of an AC.

At around lunchtime I thought to myself “Screw it.  If it’s not leaking it can just stay on.  I’ll stay in it until around 4pm, then have a swim and then, probably change into another Mermaid for the night shift”.

And so I did.  It got heavier, but not radically so, the Tarzan’s Grip tapes doggedly holding things in place.

Eventually, I started to get that vaguely icky/itchy feeling from my underwear and I began to look upon a nappy change as more of a fresh beginning than a sad end but still the Mermaid held up.

At around 3pm, the slightest hint of a cool, damp spot began to appear at my right rear thing (ALWAYS the right hand side) but nowhere near furniture-threatening levels.

Finally, at 4pm, I peeled it off whereupon it slunk to the floor with a warm, wet thud.  It smelled like you’d expect a one day old peed-in nappy once taken off.  Not good.  No wonder I was itchy.

One long, languid swim later and I showered before changing into a booster-equipped BetterDry to manage dinner and Sunday night.

I weighed the Mermaid:  at 2070g weight, it confirmed my suspicion that I was peeing below-par, probably only in the realm of 1.7 to 1.8 litres over an entire 24 hour period.

Still, it had successfully survived my 24 hour Lemans Nappy test.  Fully.  I honoured it accordingly by transporting it directly to the outside wheelie bin for pride of place on its own.  As nappy royalty, I felt that it should not have to lie-in-state in my study nappy bin with lesser competitors.  That and the fact that it was off-gassing like an ignored toddler on a hot summer day.

[Little Sherri]

I love that diaper. I have also driven a couple for 24 hours. I have some in my trove, but I'm very selective about when I reach for them, because I rarely have the 18+ consecutive hours that they deserve, with latitude to wear a big diaper, as we're often running around to this or that. Maybe if my initiative to drop some weight proves fruitful, I'll be able to disguise them under my once-again oversized jeans, which have become "correctly-sized" over the course of a couple of years of making my own IPA's, and so really only leave me confident about their cloaking abilities when I'm wearing medium-duty, day-weight diapers like Rearz Lil' Monsters. 

I'm in a Critter Caboose today - have you tried these yet, @oznl? They're taped on rather than the NASA-grade hook/loop fasteners on the 'Tales, and I'd say that they're at the penultimate level in the Rearz pantheon, retiring only after all but the Mermaid Tale and Elite Hybrid would have fallen. A very comfy diaper. I put it on right at bedtime last night and woke up having barely dipped my toe into their capacity, so I'm hoping to get about 18+ hours out of this one - I have no where to physically be, really, today or this evening, and as far as I know, my wife has not invited anyone over, contractor or friend. 

[oznl]

8 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I'm in a Critter Caboose today - have you tried these yet, @oznl? They're taped on rather than the NASA-grade hook/loop fasteners on the 'Tales, and I'd say that they're at the penultimate level in the Rearz pantheon, retiring only after all but the Mermaid Tale and Elite Hybrid would have fallen. A very comfy diaper. I put it on right at bedtime last night and woke up having barely dipped my toe into their capacity, so I'm hoping to get about 18+ hours out of this one - I have no where to physically be, really, today or this evening, and as far as I know, my wife has not invited anyone over, contractor or friend. 

A timely question.

I had a quick look at my single-Australian-source Rearz dealer (there's only one in the whole country so commercial competitiveness isn't necessarily a strong suit).

The Caboose IS now available but I was puzzled to find that it was actually slightly more expensive than the Mermaid.

The difference isn't much:  AUD 49.63 per packet vs AUD 49.00 for the Mermaid (remember that the AUD is within 5% of CAD in exchange rate so you can take those numbers pretty much at face value) but it did seem odd in view of your comment that the Caboose sat slightly south of the Mermaid in terms of performance.

I'm about due to shout myself a pack of "toy" nappies.  In view of the near price parity, do you still think it's worth me trying the Caboose over another round of Mermaids?  I could always just lash out and buy a case (AUD 142 although it will be a bit cheaper for me because I'll pick them up in person and avoid the freight costs which I think is around AUD 15).

The outlier "toy" nappy would be the Str8up but given it is AUD50 for a pack of only 10 (vs Rearz 12), it really is getting a bit silly expensive.

[Little Sherri]

15 hours ago, oznl said:

In view of the near price parity, do you still think it's worth me trying the Caboose over another round of Mermaids? 

It would be for the novelty value, primarily, in my opinion. They aren't a "better" product, as far as I can tell. I haven't employed any telemetry but my experience yesterday was that the Caboose swelled up quite notably at the front first, before eventually transferring some of the wealth rearward. I assisted them in this endeavor by reclining back at a fairly steep angle while reading later in the day. I finally retired the diaper at 8:00 PM, because I got invited to join a friend for a pint and didn't want to look like I was smuggling a badger in my trousers. I had been in it at that point for roughly 20 hours, although the first 7 of those could have been handled by any low-end product you can name - it was a dry night. 

It remained very comfortable, probably just starting to get into that phase where it no longer felt like a decadent indulgence, and I would have started thinking about what my next move should be. 

In conclusion, the Mermaid Tale gives no quarter in comparison to the Critter Caboose, but they are generally very comparable. What might tilt the balance in favour of the 'Tale for you is the fact that you're already rated on that equipment and can fly it confidently. I don't think that a Caboose would perform much differently, but, as you know, ultra-capacity nappies when pushed to their limits display characteristics that you would never have been aware of, if you kept them below the 90% mark. They're rather like performance cars in that regard. A Mustang Shelby GT500 is about as fast as a C8 Corvette in almost anyone's hands, until you get to about 9/10ths of their limits, and then the 'Stang starts getting a bit spooky. 

[oznl]

Another pee-wet dream on Thursday night.

This one was especially vivid.  I was lying in bed alongside my beloved when it occurred to me that there was pee in my bladder.

In my dream of course, I wasn’t wearing a nappy.  I was wearing a pair of heavy, flannel pyjamas (it was 30C overnight and the AC above our bed was roaring so naturally our subconscious thinks “heavy flannel pyjamas”.  It’s good that we don’t make real-world decisions based on subconscious logic.)

Because I was dreaming, I thought it would be perfectly fine just to pee myself in bed next to her and avoid having to get up.  I’m not sure I even needed to pee especially.  It just seemed like a good idea.  So I did.

There ensued a hyper-real tactile experience of wetting my pants whilst laying on my left side in bed.  I could feel the spreading warmth developing into hot trickles tracing a path across the front of my crotch down to my left hip.  The concept of leaking was just that, a concept.  What was a leak?  I was wetting the bed right?  (In actual waking-world, I was in a pinned terry towel nappy so there was indeed very little chance of doing damage with a side-loaded pee).

As far as I know, I did not wake.  Instead, I recalled the dream vividly when the alarm went off at 6am Friday and I greeted the dawn a warm wet crotch and left hip.  Unsurprisingly, my bladder was empty at this point.

Dreaming through an episode of wetting myself whilst in bed is far from new but there were a couple of hints that this phenomena is becoming more embedded (no pun intended) in my world.

Firstly, this sleep-wetting episode occurred somewhere between 4am and 6am: early morning. There MAY have been earlier sleep wetting events that night but I can’t recall them.  Previous events that I’ve been confident in pinning down (STILL no pun intended) to a time have overwhelmingly occurred in the first third of the night, the phase typically dominated by deep sleep.  Based on smart-watch data and clock observations, I think I’ve even seen graphed reflections of me peeing in my sleep and briefly waking myself in the process.  Either that or I pee myself during sleep phase transition.  In any case, for me, it’s relatively unusual for a bedwetting event to occur in the early morning: it’s more commonly between 11pm and 3am.

Secondly, no alcohol was involved. It had been at least 36 hours since I’d touched booze.

Saturday morning I woke at 4am to discover that I’d again wet myself in slumber-land.  I’d gone to bed in a dry cloth pull-up.  I didn't feel wet on waking but a quick digital exploration confirmed soggy toweling under my plastic pants.  It was then that I could recall a vague glimmer from some point during the night that I’d become aware I was peeing.  I remembered becoming aware that I was “getting wet” down there and some kind of bladder spasm was underway but I never looked at the clock and I’d zero recollection of it finishing.  It appears that the experience of urinating in bed has become normalised to the point where whilst it MAY rouse me, it may not be enough to reach full wakefulness before I sink back under waves of somnolence.

Confident that I was reliably bedwetting I went to bed dry again the next night (more cloth pull ups) and had to “manually” wet my nappy at 3am because I needed to go and I was dry.

Serves me right for being confident.  The best way for me to wet the bed remains for me not to intend to.

[Little Sherri]

11 hours ago, oznl said:

The best way for me to wet the bed remains for me not to intend to.

As we've discussed previously, this is very much my experience was well. I'm going to the West coast in a couple of weeks for a weekend, staying with family, and I fully expect that I will wet the bed flagrantly and with abandon, every night. I'm sure I'll be drinking, thus doubling the odds of this, but I'm willing to bet that if I abstained, I'd probably still do it, just because I don't want to. 

[oznl]

I’ve been a bit out of sorts this week.  Nothing dramatic.  Nothing sufficiently tangible to warrant handing over half a day’s pay in a medical gap payment for one of Australia’s notoriously “free” doctor consultations.  Poor, interrupted sleep, significant physical fatigue, vaguely sinus-like face aches (but no upper respiratory symptoms) and the usual tell-tale that something is wrong in my body: a degree of cardiac arrhythmia.

Used as I am to cardiac arrhythmia (with a very long medical history of it with loads of suitably-expensive surgical interventions), I am very NOT prone to freaking out when episodes occur.  They are for me, a fact of life.  At some point in the hopefully-distant future, they may also be a fact of death but it doesn’t pay me to dwell upon these thoughts.

These ones were a little worse than average though.  Even my Christmas-present-smart-watch was getting concerned (the one that conflates “not moving” with “sleep” which suggests to me that my death will do wonders for my sleep scores).   The arrhythmia was near constant and featured occasional chest twinges, fatigue and dizziness (I know, normal people would be dialling “000”, “999”, “911”, “112” or whatever other arbitrary number their particular jurisdiction had defined as “emergency call” at this point but I’m a long way from normal.)  Instead, for moments like these, I carry a “pill in my pocket” kind of thing: a fast-acting beta blocker.

If I take one or two, usually things calm down.  If I take them closer to their recommended ceiling dose (1 – 2 tables, 3 – 4 times per day), they mess with my digestive tract.

And thusly I shat my nappy standing at the kitchen counter peeling potatoes.  There wasn’t much prelude to this escapade.  I was vaguely aware that I needed to “go” when suddenly, I REALLY needed to go.  At this point I made to exit stage left for a bathroom but sensations from the relevant area arose to suggest that this ship had already sailed.  I WAS going.  A giant, unstoppable cramp appeared followed by a padding-muted bum explosion.  Things down there then felt, well, substantial… 

I’d gone from “damp nappy” to “moonwalking” in close to an instant.  While I was making dinner.  Ewww…

Still, logistically, this could have been FAR worse than it actually was.  I was minutes away from my evening change and meters away from my own bathroom in my own house.  Still, I had to run an olfactory gauntlet between the kitchen and our bathroom (avoiding people) before dealing with a nappy change that could see our en-suite re-categorised as a crime scene and then I would have to surreptitiously discard a nappy that contained within it more horrors than a Jeffrey Dahmer Tupperware party.

Faecal incontinence is a hard limit for me.  I addition to breaking the commitment I made to my beloved upon unilaterally migrating to 24/7 nappies to keep my nappies rated as merely “unpleasant” as opposed to “ghastly”, I find the clean-up tedious and thoroughly unpleasant.

Whilst I do NOT think I am teetering on the precipice of bowel incontinence, this week’s incident is yet another inescapable data point suggesting that there’s been some collateral damage in this department after four years of not bothering with bladder control.  Whilst nominally in control for messes, the tables are easily tilted and WHEN they DO tilt, they do so quickly and steeply.

I completed peeling the spuds as quickly as I could, simultaneously trying to avoid any kind of cue for any person to approach me (because approaching me wouldn’t be good) before proceeding carefully upstairs to peel off clothing behind closed (and ideally, hermetically-sealed) doors.

Undressing was like unwrapping a Christmas present from Satan.  With each removed layer, things smelled worse but before long I was shaking out my decidedly-used nappy over the toilet in the ardent hope that EVERYTHING would simply fall off into it (it didn’t) at which point I could push a button on the cistern and the whole disaster would magically disappear to somewhere else (maybe Peru).  Then, as a kind of bonus, whilst doing this I somehow peed on the floor.

It may have been when I flushed.  I didn’t mean to and there wasn’t much but suddenly there was rapid dripping and I could feel exactly where it was coming from.  I tried to stop it but THAT trick hasn’t worked in a very long time.  I don’t quite know what was going on there.  It just kind of appeared.  As far as I know, I’m still urinary continent but now there was a floor tile that begged to differ.

I haven’t done ANY road testing of my urinary continence for several months.  Perhaps it’s time I did.

It was the bum department that was getting all the headlines right now though.

Things settled down a bit in the basement the next day but there was still a “near miss” at the office.  For the very first time in my career there, I saw what the inside of the staff toilets looks like.  Thank you Rearz, designer of the “can-be-removed-and-replaced” Elite Hybrid Incontrol Rearz Barry.

This has happened before.  Not for half a century but more than once since turning down this strange road.  This is just the latest incident arisen from this department when it’s been operating under attack.  The less-than-glamorous take-away from all this is that whilst we can degrade our urinary continence through disuse, there is (for me at least) almost inevitably some co-incidental degradation around the corner where the social and operational costs of failure are much, much higher. 

TLDR:  Even if you don’t plan for it.  Even if you don’t want it.  Play this game and sh1t happens.

Something to think about.

[Little Sherri]

Wow, @oznl, in reading this, I am, in turns, very concerned for you, laughing out loud, and, vaguely concerned for me. 

Frist of all, the "Jeffrey Dahmer Tupperware party" reference cannot be passed over. Grimly hilarious. 

Secondly, I know by now that you are no stranger to cardiac arrythmia, but take care, my friend. I am wishing you all the best from over here in the Frozen North. I'm sure we all are. I also think that you put your finger on one of the dangers inherent in a "user co-pays" model for the provision of somewhat-socialized medical care, being that people will tend to sit on minor issues until they turn into major issues, at which point the cost for everyone increases exponentially. And you have some financial reserves - many do not. A good friend of mine moved to the US a number of years ago; he has a good job and good benefits, including insurance, but when his kids were involved in a couple of sports mishaps, the bills involved still went well into the four digits, USD, and then one of his sons did a kamikaze jump off of a couch, onto a side table, and gave himself a good gash on the noggin. This guy makes a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, and even he found himself briefly in a debate with his wife about if this needed to be looked at, or could be dealt with at home. So imagine some poor sap, sitting in a mobile home sorting his food stamps, and contemplating the lump under his arm that has become a bit tender. What is he going to do about it? Probably just sleep badly. 

This is relevant to me because where I live, provincially, the lefties had power for a over a decade, and burned through all of the public's goodwill and good intentions in a series of stupid scandals and boondoggles, until a fed-up public didn't exactly elect a right-wing government, but rather, they just didn't vote at all, en mass, and the lowest percentage voter turnout in history resulted in a right-tilting majority government with an iron-clad mandate from 34% of the electorate, in a province where there are two left parties and one right party, and the left generally gets about 60% of the support in polls. They then staged a slow starving of the public healthcare system, claiming a lack of resources while also cutting taxes and fees, and at the same time saying they'd generated surpluses for the first time in history. Next, the public system was declared "broken", and, they're now planning to open up a bunch of for-profit medical clinics, in order to "ease the burden" on the public system, but here's the rub - the most strained resource in the system is people. There are already surgical suites going unused in public hospitals, because they don't have the nurses and doctors to staff them. So opening a new private surgical clinic doesn't really create more capacity in the system as a whole. Why is there a lack of staff? Well, holding nurses to a 1% per year pay increase while inflation exceeds 6% might have something to do with it... Canadian nurses and doctors find it very easy to work in the US. As they will in private clinics back home. Paid for, for now, with public dollars, but the long-term plan is to add "do you want fries with that" side dishes that you pay with your credit card. SO, your spinal fusion in a private clinic is "free" (at a cost to the public system greater than that of doing it in a public setting), but, if you want titanium ball bearings between your squashed disks instead, that, of course, is extra, and the public system sees no need to fund such "perks" as gold-standard treatments that result in less pain and/or greater mobility. 

Oh, but I digress terribly. Maybe I should cut and paste this whole diatribe over to my own thread. I feel I'm being rude. 

Back to the topic at hand... as we've discussed before, while I haven't shat my pants while standing at the island in my kitchen yet, I have had a couple of disturbing attempted insurrections from that department while sleeping. It does seem that lower standards of management in the #1 department can generalize over to the #2 department, at least somewhat. Which I do not want. But here we are. Something to think about!

[BabyJilly_S]

I can only echo @Little Sherri in wishing you well and echo those initial sentiments.

Just over a couple of years in and haven't experienced those things yet. Although unchecked I believe my daytime continence is fine, I just don't want to find out. I may be slightly more interested as in the second department i don't generally exert control, if it wants to happen it happens, with the upside of that being i am seemingly regular and that's first thing after getting up normally into the overnighter. Loss of that control would indeed be irksome. 

Off topic though, it's an odd thing, this internet business and its etiquette. As I read your post my mouse hovered over the like button (as it usually does) I wondered what it would be that I was actually liking. Am I liking the fact that you posted or the contents of the post or am I simply offering support by liking? Is it "Hey Oznl, I really like that you have cardiac arrythmia"!, I often wondered that when people like posts saying that a relative has died...

In the end I clicked like, and assumed that as intelligent folks we all believe its the support thing.

[oznl]

The weeks seem to be flying by lately.   Every time I sit down in my study it’s next Thursday and I’m not always sure how I got here.

I’m reminded of the scene in H.G. Wells “The Time Machine” movie (the proper 1960 version) where the Time Traveller, seated in his Victorian study replete with chintzy wall paper and too much dust-attracting bric-a-brac, accelerates forward through time marvelling as the days and nights speed up around him into a contiguous blur as he hurtles towards his unknown future.

A better, albeit darker metaphor might come from one of John Dunne’s more famous sonnets: “I run to death, and Death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday…”

Option C might be along the lines of David Byrne’s possibly epiphanous composition, “We’re On The Road To Nowhere”.

Ok, that’s enough philosophy.

There’s been the usual number of nappies consumed, or in the case of cloth, at least dampened and really not that much else to report not that I let this stop me.

It’s been typical weather for the time of year: hot and humid.  A fact reflected in a series of curiously-drier-than expected nappies but wetter t-shirts.  We really DO pee less when exposed to high temperatures.  It’s a thing.  I see it, feel it and wear it every day.

The silver lining to all of this sweat is that nappy leaks seem to retreat into foggy memory.  At least until today but that was my fault.  Using gorilla-force on a Barry (Rearz Incontrol Hybrid Elite for those requiring formal taxonomy) at my morning change caused the lower-right tape to part company from the nappy it was attached to.

Thusly I found myself standing forlornly in our ensuite bathroom, bathed in a shaft of reflected morning sunlight, one hand holding up 75% of a viable-day nappy, the other holding before me, a small piece of adhesive tape featuring smaller amounts of shredded nappy at one edge.  The scene was completed by the trusty-but-weary BetterDry night nappy balled up on the floor at my right ankle, like some noble-but-fallen battle chicken.

It would have made a cracking Rembrandt.

More immediately however, I’d need to effect a repair, if not go and retrieve a brand new Barry so that the day could proceed and I might yet manifest my destiny.

And that’s how my breakfast got burnt.

A foray outside our bedroom to my study (next port of call whereupon I dump my night nappy in my nappy bin with a fairly audible “thud”) is, it seems, my beloved’s cue to start the toaster in the kitchen below.

I’m perfectly capable (and willing) to make my own toast.  I like to imagine that my beloved does this for me as a token of her love but I must also accept the possibility that as a person who has managed to make themselves a bedwetter in their 50s, she regards me an idiot and therefore unqualified to operate a toaster.

In any case, I’d tricked her.  My foray to my study to find some masking tape to effect a repair (normally a prelude to me descending the stairs and looking for breakfast) caused her to start the daily toast prematurely.

After a few more minutes of my non-appearance however, she’d cancelled the toaster a few minutes into its cycle only to put it back on again when she heard me on the stairs later.

As a technocrat, someone such as myself would instantly foresee that this meant effectively a double-helping of watt-hours delivered to the bread but my beloved, whilst not stupid, operates on a higher intellectual plane than the mundanities of toast.  This of course led to the escape of the bread’s magic smoke and a subsequent breakfast of vegemite-on-carbon such as is fit for an idiot (I fully accept that due to cultural culinary differences, many non-Australians would regard the vegemite to be the desecration of perfectly good carbon rather than the other way around but that discussion for another day).

The cremated toast was considered by my beloved of course to be entirely my fault.  I had made no complaint but received her pre-emptive counter-attack anyway.

I didn’t bother explaining the reason for my false start downstairs but instead gratefully crunched through my charcoal-based breakfast. 

The lesson in all of this is that although nothing is discussed, she is far from blind to my morning nappy route and to a certain extent, tacitly modulates her domestic cycle around it.  It’s the “thud” of the nappy bin that’s audible from downstairs.   Instead of swinging from a chandelier, her response to this unambiguously nappy-based routine event is to make me toast and for this I am deeply grateful.

 The repaired Barry leaked of course.

The masking tape didn’t hold nearly as well as the factory hook-and-loop tape.  By late afternoon, I was aware of a wet plastic pant leg elastic and a damp spot on my compression pant.  It wasn’t bad enough to be a problem but evidence enough that Barry tapes are wrought from sterner stuff.

[BabyJilly_S]

1 hour ago, oznl said:

The repaired Barry leaked of course.

The masking tape didn’t hold nearly as well as the factory hook-and-loop tape.  By late afternoon, I was aware of a wet plastic pant leg elastic and a damp spot on my compression pant.  It wasn’t bad enough to be a problem but evidence enough that Barry tapes are wrought from sterner stuff.

Ah, the much more manly duc tape / gaffa tape was required

I have some of the black "gorilla tape" brand and frankly if you want something to never come unstuck , i would use that, it's ferocious....