Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

13 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

This suggestion might be entirely impractical, and/or ineffective, but recalls back to a time when I didn't always have a stock of proper ABDL diapers in the house, because I couldn't pay for them in any manner other than cash, lest it result in a conversation about how my wife had just gotten off the phone with the fraud department at American Express over the $104 charge from Big Baby's Big Diaper Emporium. Back then, I had to frequently make due with awful supermarket diapers designed for the perimortem crowd, and I engaged in a number of ad hoc engineering improvement projects on them, such as the use of perforated toddler diapers as stuffers, and, relevant to this conversation, the application of a band of clear packing tape, or white duct tape, across the front of plastic diapers, to create a landing zone from which the tapes could be removed without shredding the front of the diaper. One side effect of this was structural reinforcement of the top of the front of the diaper - the front of the waistband no longer folded forward very easily. And, I was only going across the front panel of the diaper, because I wanted to be able to get out of it for the other of nature's callings. If you ran tape from hip to hip across the top of the front of the diaper - if you typically discard it first thing anyway - then perhaps the front would be less likely to fold over, thus eliminating one of the potential failure modes? 

Yep, I've thought about rebuilding one but it does make changing a little, um, noisy...  I've got this wild hope that somebody experience with this brand will leap forth and shout "you're doing it WRONG!!!  do it THIS way!"

[Little Sherri]

23 minutes ago, oznl said:

Yep, I've thought about rebuilding one but it does make changing a little, um, noisy

I used to struggle with that big-time, back before my better half had been appraised of my juvenile wardrobe preferences. Peeling the tape off the role ever so slowly, running the water and the fan to provide some cover... eventually I developed a process wherein I would wait for her to leave on some errand, and then set up an assembly line in the kitchen and modify half a package at a time, so that I could go several days without any noisy tape work. 

[oznl]

On top of our marital mattress is a waterproof sheet.  It may seem surprising but it’s not there because I wear nappies.  It’s there (and has been for decades) because it was suggested as a control for a dust mite allergy: a job it incidentally does very well if you’re looking for a “vanilla” reason to have a waterproof mattress protector.  No, really…

In a sub-tropical climate however, a plastic sheet is not nice to sleep on.  Therefore, on top of the waterproof sheet is a polyester “mattress protector” that provides a permeable, padded, cloth-like ventilated layer between the bottom sheet and plastic. 

Obviously, in its sacrificial location above the waterproof sheet, this mattress protector is washable but is “washable” in a similar sense than an iPhone is “waterproof”.  It isn’t an aspect of its functionality that gets exploited very often.

Since I’ve been in nappies every night for the last 17 months, an outright “bed-wetting” incident can’t really happen.  There is too much gear in the way.  Nevertheless, there have been a few minor leaks here and there as I’ve learned lessons about how to pee in your pants all the time and get away with it.  For the most part, I’ve ignored these small damp spots and let evaporation take its course until the next washing day: such were their size and such are the camouflaging capabilities of beige coloured sheets.  A weekly bedding change cleanses away all traces of my misdemeanours and Saturday’s sheets are crisp and fresh from being baked in sunlight to the point of sterilisation in the harsh Australian sun.  If our sheets could develop melanomas like our sheet users do, there wouldn’t be any sheets left.

Our mattress protector however sees none of this ultra-violet goodness.  Like the bottom of the sea, it lurks unseen below, silently and uncomplainingly accepting whatever gravity sends its way.

A week or so of attempting to repurpose the infuriatingly porous ABU Simples as night nappies had somewhat compromised the waterproof nature of my underwear and I’d been wondering about the mattress protector’s pristine state.

And so, it was last Saturday, a perfect laundry drying day with sunny skies and roaring, dry westerly winds that after stripping the sheets I said to my beloved “let’s wash the mattress protector while we are at it”.

 Sheet changing is really the only time at which it is laid bare before us but even then, our room is somewhat dark, it kind of looked ok.  She didn’t seem convinced.  “Mmmm” she said…  “Do you think?”  And then, surprisingly, she stepped over and flung open the plantation shutters shining a rare and brilliant white daylight onto our otherwise dark and hidden mattress protector.

Holy crap!

Her side had the faintest shadow of sweat past that should of itself suggest that some laundering could be in order.

My side however was a riot of pee stains accusingly clustered around what I will loosely describe as my “nappy zone”. 

Faint, but against the pristine whiteness of unsullied polyester, clearly visible showers of yellow circles could be seen.  Some light, some dark, some with an interesting “ring” formation, dark at the edges and light in the middle, like a urine-flavoured doughnut.  It looked an incontinent hamster had been having convulsions or some kind of pee-based tie-dye experiment.  Most of these stains looked quite small but the odd saucer sized one had me wondering just how in the hell I had slept through it.

What it did NOT look was clean.  Clearly each of those seemingly-surreptitious leaks had steeped through the sheet above like some exotic tea to be captured and preserved for stained posterity upon the white polyester below: 96% polyester, 4% pee.

“Yes” she said brightly.  “Let’s give it a wash!”.  Nothing further was said.

[Stroller]

We have a similar set-up - waterproof cover then quilted cover then the sheet.  Last time I looked my side was still the cleaner side - almost pristine in fact.  It's a long time since I had a leak at night (touches wood).  My night-time nappy is nearly always a terry square in a Chinese fold, with an extra cloth soaker, fastened snugly with a Snappi and two pins.  That works really well for me.  So well in fact that I've started to worry about what might happen on our next holiday without a washing machine, when I'll have to go into disposables at night.  Will I remember to roll onto my back before I wet in the night?  The way things are going the answer could be 'no'.  It doesn't matter with a terry nappy, so I've got used to wetting half asleep in any old position.

[oznl]

19 hours ago, Stroller said:

My night-time nappy is nearly always a terry square in a Chinese fold, with an extra cloth soaker, fastened snugly with a Snappi and two pins.  That works really well for me.  So well in fact that I've started to worry about what might happen on our next holiday without a washing machine, when I'll have to go into disposables at night.  Will I remember to roll onto my back before I wet in the night?  The way things are going the answer could be 'no'.  It doesn't matter with a terry nappy, so I've got used to wetting half asleep in any old position.

I absolutely agree with the terry square being excellent and having finished my one month “study period”, my data agrees with you too.

The “leak” rate on my 60” terry square nappies over August stands at 0%.  In contrast, the leak rate on ABU Simples is a laundry-provoking 33%.  Best performing disposable was the “BetterDry” at 6% leak rate (one leak and it was probably my fault due to application error).

A “leak” is any amount of moisture that has made it to outerwear, no matter how small so 33% isn’t quite as hideous as it seems, usually I didn't wake up swimming.

Terry squares are the cheapest and most reliable.  They DO however lack odour control, restrict mobility and are visually obvious which means that for me at least, they are not an every-day nappy.  I’d like to have them as an “every-night” nappy but my partner will object based on occasional odour and the permanent laundry footprint.  I use them one or two nights per week.

My experience has been that almost ALL disposables will leak in bed at some point if you are bedwetting and therefore not carefully managing your wetting position.  The answer for me has been terry-lined waterproofs as insurance over the top of them.

I have found these to be excellent:

https://www.babykins.com/collections/adult-terry-lined-plastic-pants/products/kins-lined-6-mil-double-terry-vinyl-pant-20300dltv

They are not subtle though.  Visually, it’s going to look like you are wearing a full-blown cloth nappy but in bed, who cares…  They ARE small enough to be able to travel with you.

 

[oznl]

A bizarre “nappy dream” last night:  nearly 18 months of being permanently nappy-clad and STILL they pop up  now and then.

I was on a double-deck jumbo jet, on my way back from the US to Australia.  I was flying with my wife I suspect returning from a US vacation.  I dimly recall some adventures trying to cram and implausible amount of random junk she had accumulated into a suitcase, and rather amusingly, I’d also managed to bring on board a few bottles of a very hoppy and pleasant IPA beer for me.  Perhaps this was my subconscious extracting vengeance for the alcohol-free night I’d inflicted on it.

We were in some lousy centre-aisle seats which were standard cattle-class affairs and the flight seemed full but the aircraft cabin was implausibly huge: the size of a school hall.  It was just the seats that were cramped.  It was night (this is common on a US to Australia flight segment).

Equally implausible was the huge bathroom up at the front of the aircraft.  Occupying the entire nose-cone area, it consisted of a range of private cubicles all opening on to a large waiting room (ah, if only).  I’d entered this waiting room and was admitted to one of the similarly-implausibly-spacious cubicles.  In my dream I knew I was wearing a nappy but I also knew it had to last all the way across to Sydney and then for the local connecting flight up north to my home town.  I didn’t need to pee but I was planning a tactical one in an effort to guarantee nappy range for the rest of the trip.  In the cubicle I pulled down the front of my nappy and tried to pee. I just didn’t have the urge and it took a long time.  When it finally started however, instead of a stream, it was a random weak sprinkler kind of thing going not into the toilet but over the front of my thighs which I could feel getting wet.

I’d been gone from my plane seat for ages.  When I got back, my wife had taken over my aisle seat and was asleep, forcing me to climb over her to the centre seat where I drank some of the opened bottle of beer that was waiting for me.

Some indeterminate time later (but it felt like a LONG time, maybe a separate dream-episode), I approached the toilets again, this time at the REAR of the aircraft.  These were again, a massive array of cubicles adjacent to a waiting area.  I didn’t need to pee then either but again, felt I should again try to “empty the tank” in an effort to preserve my nappy.  The absence of any sensation of a need to pee seems to be resonating with real life right now.  It might be because I’ve simply gotten so good at reflexively periodically voiding that my bladder capacity is never used but it seems that for me, there’s no such thing as a pee urge these days outside of the pee urge that sometimes actually accompanies a voiding event.

Eventually, pee started sprinkling out and around again, wetting my legs but completely missing the toilet no matter what I did.  The pee would only go on ME.  This wasn’t great but at least wasn’t obvious as I seemed to be wearing black suit pants: odd for an international flight sector.

I woke up the next morning in real life.  Not uncommonly, my bladder was empty and I could summon no more than the merest dribble upon waking.  Things had already been taken care of.  I could remember dribbling a little once or twice but no substantive amount.  I needed to get up as I things to do.

Upon removing my night nappy, I found myself to be wet but not overly so.  If I hadn’t had errands to perform and already tugged at the tapes, I may have chosen to leave that nappy in place for a while longer.  Measuring, it had only taken 615ml in 13 hours of wearing and with that, not even an ABU Simple will leak.  Nevertheless, I clearly HAD peed in it substantially at some point but it wasn’t clear what had happened before bed vs what happened afterwards.

It was a very strange dream, not at all exciting and yet memorable and vaguely disturbing.  The key themes appeared to be no need to pee, an inability to pee into a toilet and trying to balance my wife’s travel objectives with my nappies.  I’ve no idea if the two “sprinkler” episodes corresponded to sleep-wetting events or not but on the evidence, I’d used my nappies more than I could remember during the night. 

[Newbee]

5 hours ago, oznl said:

A bizarre “nappy dream” last night:  nearly 18 months of being permanently nappy-clad and STILL they pop up  now and then.

I was on a double-deck jumbo jet, on my way back from the US to Australia.  I was flying with my wife I suspect returning from a US vacation.  I dimly recall some adventures trying to cram and implausible amount of random junk she had accumulated into a suitcase, and rather amusingly, I’d also managed to bring on board a few bottles of a very hoppy and pleasant IPA beer for me.  Perhaps this was my subconscious extracting vengeance for the alcohol-free night I’d inflicted on it.

We were in some lousy centre-aisle seats which were standard cattle-class affairs and the flight seemed full but the aircraft cabin was implausibly huge: the size of a school hall.  It was just the seats that were cramped.  It was night (this is common on a US to Australia flight segment).

Equally implausible was the huge bathroom up at the front of the aircraft.  Occupying the entire nose-cone area, it consisted of a range of private cubicles all opening on to a large waiting room (ah, if only).  I’d entered this waiting room and was admitted to one of the similarly-implausibly-spacious cubicles.  In my dream I knew I was wearing a nappy but I also knew it had to last all the way across to Sydney and then for the local connecting flight up north to my home town.  I didn’t need to pee but I was planning a tactical one in an effort to guarantee nappy range for the rest of the trip.  In the cubicle I pulled down the front of my nappy and tried to pee. I just didn’t have the urge and it took a long time.  When it finally started however, instead of a stream, it was a random weak sprinkler kind of thing going not into the toilet but over the front of my thighs which I could feel getting wet.

I’d been gone from my plane seat for ages.  When I got back, my wife had taken over my aisle seat and was asleep, forcing me to climb over her to the centre seat where I drank some of the opened bottle of beer that was waiting for me.

Some indeterminate time later (but it felt like a LONG time, maybe a separate dream-episode), I approached the toilets again, this time at the REAR of the aircraft.  These were again, a massive array of cubicles adjacent to a waiting area.  I didn’t need to pee then either but again, felt I should again try to “empty the tank” in an effort to preserve my nappy.  The absence of any sensation of a need to pee seems to be resonating with real life right now.  It might be because I’ve simply gotten so good at reflexively periodically voiding that my bladder capacity is never used but it seems that for me, there’s no such thing as a pee urge these days outside of the pee urge that sometimes actually accompanies a voiding event.

Eventually, pee started sprinkling out and around again, wetting my legs but completely missing the toilet no matter what I did.  The pee would only go on ME.  This wasn’t great but at least wasn’t obvious as I seemed to be wearing black suit pants: odd for an international flight sector.

I woke up the next morning in real life.  Not uncommonly, my bladder was empty and I could summon no more than the merest dribble upon waking.  Things had already been taken care of.  I could remember dribbling a little once or twice but no substantive amount.  I needed to get up as I things to do.

Upon removing my night nappy, I found myself to be wet but not overly so.  If I hadn’t had errands to perform and already tugged at the tapes, I may have chosen to leave that nappy in place for a while longer.  Measuring, it had only taken 615ml in 13 hours of wearing and with that, not even an ABU Simple will leak.  Nevertheless, I clearly HAD peed in it substantially at some point but it wasn’t clear what had happened before bed vs what happened afterwards.

It was a very strange dream, not at all exciting and yet memorable and vaguely disturbing.  The key themes appeared to be no need to pee, an inability to pee into a toilet and trying to balance my wife’s travel objectives with my nappies.  I’ve no idea if the two “sprinkler” episodes corresponded to sleep-wetting events or not but on the evidence, I’d used my nappies more than I could remember during the night. 

I never remember wetting my nappy at night all I know is I wake up very wet every morning.

[Little Sherri]

11 hours ago, oznl said:

It was a very strange dream, not at all exciting and yet memorable and vaguely disturbing.

That was an interesting dream, very detailed and relatively long; of the few diaper-focused dreams I've had, most of them have been pretty short. It's interesting that having a nappy on was also more of a background detail, like gravity and air, for a good part of the dream. I haven't had any dreams where I was in a diaper but the dream wasn't primarily focused on diapers. As an aside to all of that, the sheer ballistics of casually walking to the washroom or sipping a beer, while 40000 feet over the Pacific, moving at a notable fraction of the speed of sound, in the middle of the night, has always boggled my mind. It really is amazing that it's only slightly remarkable, and that it's pretty rare for these rocketing aluminum tubes full of humanity to scatter themselves into the abyss below. 

I've never had to manage diapers on a flight longer than about 7.5 hours, which is well within the judiciously-managed range of a decent medium-duty product; I've had a backup diaper with me but have never had to resort to it in mid-air - I've always made it at least to my connecting point before having to swap. One concern that comes to mind is what the hell to do with the 5-lb remains of a diaper on a plane - it sure as hell wasn't meant to fit through the gum-pack sized slot that guards the garbage bin in most aircraft washrooms. I guess it becomes part of your carry-on? "Anything to declare....?"

[oznl]

12 hours ago, Newbee said:

I never remember wetting my nappy at night all I know is I wake up very wet every morning.

In my case, my bedwetting is a learned behaviour developed by practice and it’s debatable how deeply asleep I am when it happens or even if a partially-awake brain “decides” to do this (I don’t know and I don’t really care – I just don’t get woken up by a full bladder at 3am anymore which is nice).  I’m not sure of your circumstances but if you are incontinent due to physiological reasons, maybe it’s more likely your subconscious doesn’t necessarily get the memos with respect to pee events.

5 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

That was an interesting dream, very detailed and relatively long; of the few diaper-focused dreams I've had, most of them have been pretty short. It's interesting that having a nappy on was also more of a background detail, like gravity and air, for a good part of the dream. I haven't had any dreams where I was in a diaper but the dream wasn't primarily focused on diapers. As an aside to all of that, the sheer ballistics of casually walking to the washroom or sipping a beer, while 40000 feet over the Pacific, moving at a notable fraction of the speed of sound, in the middle of the night, has always boggled my mind. It really is amazing that it's only slightly remarkable, and that it's pretty rare for these rocketing aluminum tubes full of humanity to scatter themselves into the abyss below. 

I've never had to manage diapers on a flight longer than about 7.5 hours, which is well within the judiciously-managed range of a decent medium-duty product; I've had a backup diaper with me but have never had to resort to it in mid-air - I've always made it at least to my connecting point before having to swap. One concern that comes to mind is what the hell to do with the 5-lb remains of a diaper on a plane - it sure as hell wasn't meant to fit through the gum-pack sized slot that guards the garbage bin in most aircraft washrooms. I guess it becomes part of your carry-on? "Anything to declare....?"

Yes, I’ve had my share of dreams where nappies were just “there”.  This is after the initial novelty of them had faded.  Early on they were often the subject of dreams rather than simply a prop in them.

I wonder if these later ones are some way of mind trying to resolve running daily life from within nappies as they seem to revolve around dealing with them rather than being especially excited by them.

To be honest, I was a bit bored of that dream myself towards the end.  Like long haul air travel, it did go on a bit.  Sometimes I will have kind of lucid dreams in which I decided I’ve had enough of them and am able to through simple will power, alter the narrative or end them: rather odd I know.

 

The longest sector I’ve flown nappied was back from South East Asia to Sydney at around 10 hours (documented in August 2019 inside this marathon-thread/blog).  I completed it in a single BetterDry that I’d changed into at the lounge at Bangkok airport.  It was a night flight and I was a bit dehydrated so in fact I effortlessly made it all the way home: 14.5 hours in the same nappy.  Going up to Asia was different.  After 8.5 hours into Singapore, I badly needed a change which I accomplished, strangely enough, at a “changing room” at Changi Airport.  Yes, I had to nonchalantly stroll across a room and thrust a balled-up BetterDry into the waste bin but nobody was paying attention.

I’d fully planned to fly to the USA in nappies back in March (tickets booked and everything) until the plague came.  I know I can change after the pacific sector in bathrooms outside customs and immigration at LAX before having to deal with the TSA for the domestic sector.

  It was likely I'd be flagged for secondary screening out of Australia as the body scanners here are set to "nanny mode", detecting even dry nappies (learned that the hard way) but I'd resolved to suck that up.

[oznl]

Ok, enough nappy science.  Now that the data is all in, let’s talk about August…

• 62 nappies used (basically 2 nappies per day in a 24/7 duty cycle)

• 44 disposables costing A$128.95

• 22 cloth saving A$64.47 in disposables

• Total nappy spend for the month assuming 100% disposables would have been A$193.43 plus some incalculable charge for minor incidentals such as rash cream and perhaps depreciation on waterproof pants.  Even if I used 100% disposables, the cost of my 24/7 nappy habit is around A$6.34 per day, the price of a newspaper and a large cappuccino.

• 75 litres of pee produced

• 2.4 litres per day on average consisting of 1.25 litres in the “day” nappy and 1.15 litres in the “night nappy” (the pee rate is much lower at night because the night shift nappy typically does 14 - 15 hours vs 6 - 10 hours for the day nappy)

Here's the breakdown by utilisation and performance.  I wouldn't worry too much about the BetterDry "failure".  I'm fairly certain that was operator error.  I wish the ABU Simple worked better than they do for me.  I'm still prevaricating on whether dropping back from an XL to an L might somehow help.  I now have reasonably insighted opinions on these various brands, how they work and their failure modes and this has led me to divert cruise range from "night" to "day".

Type	Units used	Avg pay load	units with uncontained leakage	uncontained leak %	avg tare
Abena L4 + booster	11	893	0	0%	242
ABU Simple XL	16	1227	5	31%	226
BetterDry	15	1336	1	7%	232
Rearz Omutsu	9	1175	2	22%	595
Babykins cotton pullon + terry pull on	6	969	0	0%	884
60" sq terry folded	4	1472	0	0%	961

[oznl]

Do you know how to play the “What’s wrong? / nothing!” game with your spouse?  It goes thusly:

1.       “Sigh…”

2.       “What’s wrong?”

3.       “Oh nothing.”

4.       Pause

5.       Repeat

As the sigher, just repeat this cadence over and over adding a few mournful looks and long silences but NEVER give your victim the grab-hold of knowing precisely what it is that has incurred your displeasure.

When you start to get bored or sense that your other player might abandon the game, that’s when you can toss in a cryptic hint to keep things going.

It was Saturday: washing day.  After I got my eventual “cryptic hint”, it seems that at least one of my misdemeanours (never show all your cards, hold other misdemeanours in reserve) was seizing control of the washing machine to wash nappies as a gap in operations presented itself rather than waiting until the end of the day.  This is important on Saturday as generally; I will have spent Thursday morning until Saturday morning in cloth nappies and the consequences of those underwear decisions need to be dealt with.  Amongst other things, failing to launder promptly opens up that additional spousal battlefront of my nappies making the laundry smell.  They WILL smell if I leave them there long enough and that’s why I’d done the “carpe diem” thing with the washing machine.

Another reason to wash them promptly here is that line-drying towelling and cloth nappies takes hours in winter and spring.  If I’m unable to access the washing machine until early afternoon, I simply can’t get them dried.  Living under trees in south east Queensland where giant nocturnal fruit bats abound, you NEVER want to make the mistake of leaving your nappies on the line overnight: trust me on this one.  The sheets however will line dry in 30 minutes this time of year.  It just makes more sense to do the sheets later and I can luxuriate in both dry sheets and dry nappies.

As if sense had anything to do with our spousal conversations about nappies.

Having dragged the “n-word” out of the psychological cupboard under the stairs and defended my choices, it seems that round 2 was going to be a reprise of the famous “When will this end?” speech.  This one is relatively easy to spot by virtue of her next question being: “When will this end?” whilst gazing dourly at my crotch.

“It will end when I want it to end” I replied with us much equanimity as I could inject into a nine-word sentence.  As the dour look returned, I again reminded her about marriage versus ownership and how I went out of my way to insulate her from having any operational or social consequence from my unconventional choice in underwear.  In return, she reminded me how unhappy all this made her.

I countered with my standardised response, loosely paraphrased as “It’s not my intention to make you unhappy but your unhappiness is your choice here and not a privation inflicted upon you.  There’s nothing about this that actually causes you inconvenience or consequence, I’m harming no-one, let alone you.  The price of YOUR happiness here would be my unhappiness and I don’t think that’s fair”.

A sullen silence fell over her for a few seconds.  I wondered if I might reasonably depart outside to consider the “job of the day”, dealing with the horrors-that-lurk-beneath the swimming pool cover on a pool that hasn’t been looked at since May when it was covered for winter.

I moved as if to leave.  But wait, there’s more.

“And what’s with the coloured pattern nappies?  Why are THEY now a thing?”

Clearly (and unsurprisingly) my Omutsu sheep and penguin nappies HAD been noticed.  Not that I’d gone to any particular length to conceal them but nor had I paraded about in front of her with them exposed either.  In her mind, the DL thing is just unhealthy but the AB thing should be illegal if it isn’t already.

“That’s just what they are.  Old ones wear out eventually, I get new ones and that’s how they are made now” I responded in a reply filling dead air with more words than insight.

“Well I think it’s SICK.” she announced helpfully,  “I think you need THERAPY!”

This provokes sufficient guilt to prevent me getting annoyed.  The old trick of spouses attempting to use therapy to renovate the bits of their partners that they don’t like doesn’t work anyway as far as I can tell.  They were just words too.   

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say at this point so I nodded (in acknowledgement rather than any agreement) and left to deal with a very wet swimming pool from the warm confines of an only slightly wet Abriform L4 + booster beneath my gardening shorts.  Her rancour didn’t last.  Outside of her unsolicited insights into my mental health, she was perfectly pleasant across the balance of the day, made me lunch as I worked on the pool and I *did* manage to get my cloth nappies dried.

She doesn’t hate me, just my nappies.

[Stroller]

I feel for you, oznl.  We may have our own troubles here, but my wife has accepted I'll be in nappies for good and doesn't seem to be troubled about it now she's had a chance to get used to it.  As fas as the washing's concerned, I do it all anyway.  On the odd occasion she wants to put something in the wash herself she'll check with me that the machine's free, but there's no resentment there.

[Little Sherri]

14 hours ago, oznl said:

Well I think it’s SICK.” she announced helpfully,  “I think you need THERAPY!”

 

This provokes sufficient guilt to prevent me getting annoyed.  The old trick of spouses attempting to use therapy to renovate the bits of their partners that they don’t like doesn’t work anyway as far as I can tell.  They were just words too.   

This possibility has been an ever-present background worry for me; my wife has been remarkably non-confrontational about my unconventional underwear preferences, and you'd have to know my wife to know that this approach is not the way she deals with most things that bother her. So, I conclude that she has either recognized that this "thing" comes from somewhere deep inside me, and she is being uncommonly considerate about it, OR, she plans to kill me for insurance money at some point. But either way, she hasn't pushed back much. 

But, I do wonder if she'll at some point raise the prospect that we should go talk to someone about all this, and I have no idea where I would be on that prospect. We did marital counselling years ago and I found it useless - it was related to her anxiety and resultant fits of irrational rage, and she would nod and agree with everything the therapist said, and then go home an act like she always did, so once my therapy benefits for the year ran out, I said I didn't want to pay for it anymore, and she agreed. Frugality to the rescue. 

I don't think I want to sit in front of some therapist and dig into this, but who knows, maybe it would be beneficial. But, if the eventual idea is that I'll walk away from my ill-conceived plan to spend my days in plastic underwear, I don't think I want to sign up for that. Maybe if the therapist eventually concludes that "this" is the least amount of harm I could possibly be doing in the world, and that I should carry on. I don't see that as likely, however - taking a medical approach to this assigns wearing diapers as a symptom of an "illness", and mitigating the illness being the goal, a decline in symptoms would be expected. Whereas I see the "illness" as being my generalized, low-level dissatisfaction, which increases when I'm NOT wearing a diaper, and thus, diapers are the least invasive "treatment" for that. 

On a side note, she did push back ever so gently this morning; her mom is staying with us for a few days, and I had on a Rearz Lil' Splash in size large, which is a diaper of medium bulk, but it was pretty wet, as I'd had it on since about 8 the previous evening, and when I pulled shorts on over it, she eyeballed me and said "I'd probably change that." So, I swapped it for a dry Lil' Monster in size medium. I guess she figured her mom might have detected the bulk of it. 

[jeremy12312]

1 hour ago, Little Sherri said:

you'd have to know my wife to know that this approach is not the way she deals with most things that bother her.  

I mean, maybe it’s just possible it doesn’t bother her?  I’ve been quietly following everyone’s posts on these 24/7 threads and it really seems like your wife doesn’t mind. Do you kind of wish she did mind?

 

 

[dondd]

I have been following this tread since inception and just now felt the need to add my two cents...

I have been 24/7 for several years now.  She knew but was not accepting.  For the last three months or so her attitude changed.  I now wear openly at home and discretely elsewhere.  By openly, diaper only to bed and often only shorts over my diaper or just a t-shirt and diaper.  Most of the time though, just padded under my regular clothes.  

My wife seems to only be concerned that I keep this private, not leave the used diapers build up in the trash to the point of being smelly, and adds an occasional comment about the cost.

Her new attitude is pretty much "whatever you need to do to be comfortable with yourself".   

So far this is working well for both of us.

[Stroller]

1 hour ago, Little Sherri said:

On a side note, she did push back ever so gently this morning; her mom is staying with us for a few days, and I had on a Rearz Lil' Splash in size large, which is a diaper of medium bulk, but it was pretty wet, as I'd had it on since about 8 the previous evening, and when I pulled shorts on over it, she eyeballed me and said "I'd probably change that." So, I swapped it for a dry Lil' Monster in size medium. I guess she figured her mom might have detected the bulk of it. 

Was that really push back?  Maybe @jeremy12312is right, and she's on the inside rather than the outside.  My wife would have done the same, but I wouldn't have seen it as a negative thing.

[oznl]

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

But, I do wonder if she'll at some point raise the prospect that we should go talk to someone about all this, and I have no idea where I would be on that prospect. We did marital counselling years ago and I found it useless - it was related to her anxiety and resultant fits of irrational rage, and she would nod and agree with everything the therapist said, and then go home an act like she always did, so once my therapy benefits for the year ran out, I said I didn't want to pay for it anymore, and she agreed. Frugality to the rescue.

If pushed, I'd be asking my partner what her objective for this therapy would be and if that objective aligns with what therapy is designed to do.  If pushed further, I might acquiesce but on the grounds that she participates.  If I know her well enough, she will balk at this.  I think it was a careless phrase rather than a particular strategy.

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

On a side note, she did push back ever so gently this morning; her mom is staying with us for a few days, and I had on a Rearz Lil' Splash in size large, which is a diaper of medium bulk, but it was pretty wet, as I'd had it on since about 8 the previous evening, and when I pulled shorts on over it, she eyeballed me and said "I'd probably change that." So, I swapped it for a dry Lil' Monster in size medium. I guess she figured her mom might have detected the bulk of it. 

I'm with @Stroller on that one.  I think that sounds more like guidance than push back and that's a positive.  Early on my partner said that she'd cover my back and let me know about leaks/odors or anything.  I just don't know if with all I've had, I can really trust her to do that or not.  I'm a bit cautious but would be grateful for such a sign that she'd hold her word on that one.

8 hours ago, dondd said:

I have been following this tread since inception and just now felt the need to add my two cents...

I have been 24/7 for several years now.  She knew but was not accepting.  For the last three months or so her attitude changed.  I now wear openly at home and discretely elsewhere.  By openly, diaper only to bed and often only shorts over my diaper or just a t-shirt and diaper.  Most of the time though, just padded under my regular clothes.  

My wife seems to only be concerned that I keep this private, not leave the used diapers build up in the trash to the point of being smelly, and adds an occasional comment about the cost.

Her new attitude is pretty much "whatever you need to do to be comfortable with yourself".   

So far this is working well for both of us.

Well, thanks for de-lurking!  That's interesting (and maybe just a smidge depressing) that it took several years for her to come in off the window ledge about this.  So I shouldn't be feeling a bit bleak about having the same old pointless debates less than 2 years in?  I'm not sure I can see myself having the same old discussion over and over for another 5 years! 

 

[DiaperboyEddie12]

On 9/1/2020 at 6:40 AM, Newbee said:

I never remember wetting my nappy at night all I know is I wake up very wet every morning.

Oh how I wish that would happen to me!  I can not wait for that day.

[BedWetMark]

On 9/10/2020 at 6:45 PM, Little Sherri said:

she eyeballed me and said "I'd probably change that." So, I swapped it for a dry Lil' Monster in size medium. I guess she figured her mom might have detected the bulk of it. 

My wife insists I "shower" several times a day. That's her code for "get out of that nappy and put normal pants on", but when her parents came over (and stopped in our garden, socially distancing), I had showered and changed ...

She knew, I knew. I got the full rocket that day.  It's just utterly unpredictable as some days will be fine. I find now that I often catch her gaze looking down at my underwear area almost as if to asses the state of play.

Sometimes I'll get "I know you need THAT at night, but just shower in the morning, have some pride" ... sigh. 

Part of me feels bad, but I don't want to stop it.

On 9/10/2020 at 3:37 AM, oznl said:

It was Saturday: washing day.  After I got my eventual “cryptic hint”, it seems that at least one of my misdemeanours (never show all your cards, hold other misdemeanours in reserve) was seizing control of the washing machine to wash nappies as a gap in operations presented itself rather than waiting until the end of the day.  This is important on Saturday as generally; I will have spent Thursday morning until Saturday morning in cloth nappies and the consequences of those underwear decisions need to be dealt with.  Amongst other things, failing to launder promptly opens up that additional spousal battlefront of my nappies making the laundry smell.  They WILL smell if I leave them there long enough and that’s why I’d done the “carpe diem” thing with the washing machine.

You washing comment made me chuckle. Generally I try to clean my things on the sly, but I threw a pair of plastic pants in the washing one morning as I was busy.

I saw my wife carry the washing to the machine later and thought "oh good, they'll be clean for later".  But upon having taken a trip upstairs to get something, I peered in the washing basket, the pants sat at the bottom on their own, purposefully discarded.

"Did you do ALL the washing?" I asked.

"Yes" was the curt reply.

"What about my pants" I bravely added.

"You shouldn't need them, deal with them yourself" was the reply.

Ho hum.  So I did. 

[BedWetMark]

Something else I introduced recently is a vest, with the poppers on.  Now I like them for a couple of reasons, 1) they keep everything in place at night and are comfortable and 2) If I'm brutally honest I like the babyish feeling.  Yeah, shoot me.

So I bought one and left it lying around in my "nappy area".  Nothing was said. 

My wife and I have taken to separate rooms at the moment, not because we hate each other, on the contrary, but I snore, LOUDLY and also, I generally like to work after hours as it's my most productive time, so I crash in another room and let her sleep.

So I pulled out the vest (it's a plain white Tykables popper vest, for info) and slept in it one night. I got up, took it off, threw it on the bed in a pile, put shorts and t-shirt on and carried on.  No comment on the room.  Same the next night. The 3rd morning, I'd done the same and my wife had decided I'd been slovenly and made that bed too.  When I checked, the vest was laid out in full, both "ends" of poppers showing, under the duvet.  So I presume this has been accepted?

It would be so much easier just to talk about this stuff face to face, but I know a few of you on here get it. 

[oznl]

It’s been a dismal week and I was very much in two minds about whether I wanted to write anything about it.

As the COVID-19 pandemic response parties its way through the economy like Batman’s Joker through a burning city, my multinational business employer has responded in the only way it knows how.  The mass lay-offs that have been on the horizon for some time are now knocking at people’s doors with HR standing beside them holding envelopes.

As a people manager, I will enjoy a double dose of this adventure: firstly, capsizing the lives of a few perfectly innocent employees by removing their livelihoods and dispatching them, their mortgages and kids to non-existent job markets in locked down cities.  Then, once this is done, my next task will be to turn and face my own corporate executioner, breaking a 37-year run of continuous employment and casting a mid-fifties, white, male, (and surreptitiously nappy-clad) middle manager onto the employment scrap heap, quite possibly for life.

A moldy carrot of a remotely-possible “redeployment” is hung before me but history suggests that these carrots are more often briefly glimpsed than dined upon.  I guess that leaving me with no hope at all for my own future would not be conducive to the level of co-operation required from me to crash-land my team.

Like so many corporate career types, I have fallen for the standard trap of defining myself largely by my job and my success at it.  The steel jaws of this trap are of course that the loss of my career becomes the loss of my identity.  With lock downs and new projects on hold pending restructure, “work” for me this week and last consists largely of sitting in front of a laptop in case something happens and contemplating the future (reflected in far too much DD time).  My sleeping patterns are again shot to hell and various other physiological symptoms have me wondering just what a full-blown anxiety disorder episode might look like.

I hope that bat soup was worth it…

It will be interesting to see if my partner decides to leverage the economic rectitude that the loss of my income will impose upon the family against the AUD 150 per month or so that I spend on nappies.  So far it has not been mentioned but I am wary of below-the-belt punches (pun intended).

The reality is that always with this scenario at the back of my mind, I have managed to set familial finances onto a fairly sure footing with investments and very little debt.  In any case, a redundancy pay-out would kick the income-can down the road for the best part of a year or more as I am (or, “was” I suppose I should learn to think) a long-haul employee.  At the back of my mind is the idea that after a year, there may be recovery to the point where some other investments start to again produce some small amount of passive income and that I may even find some type of employment although I’m not sure about rushing headlong into another career.

So, for now, I’m going to stay in nappies.  Perhaps it’s the stress but it seems that I’ve bed-wet for most of this week anyway and I just can’t see how trying to go back to grown-up underwear would make a miserable year any less miserable.

I know.  In the context of the planetary pandemic and economic depression, my problems are small, carpet-lined and first world.  The outside shot at some kind of redeployment is still in front of me.  Could somebody please let the voice in my head know this please because it won’t shut up.

[Little Sherri]

One thing I could suggest to the voice in your head is that, after the previous couple of economic meltdowns, stimulus spending resulted in the markets eventually roaring back to life, which helps on the investment side, and somewhat suddenly, companies that cut until it bled start looking for flesh to put back into the gashes. A good friend of mine is in IT upper management, and he got let go, get a decent package, then worked as a consultant for an outrageous hourly rate intermittently for about a year, and then got offered a job by one of his clients, so that they could stop paying him that hourly rate. When it was all over, he figured that he'd banked three years' salary in the course of 18 months, and, while he was earning slightly less than he had before, he also was no longer commuting into a job, and the lifestyle advantages of that more than made up for the 7-8% salary haircut that he took. Also, his benefits from his redundancy package bridged him most of the way to when his new benefits kicked in, so he was never out of pocket for dentistry or anything like that. 

 

[oznl]

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

One thing I could suggest to the voice in your head is that, after the previous couple of economic meltdowns, stimulus spending resulted in the markets eventually roaring back to life, which helps on the investment side, and somewhat suddenly, companies that cut until it bled start looking for flesh to put back into the gashes. A good friend of mine is in IT upper management, and he got let go, get a decent package, then worked as a consultant for an outrageous hourly rate intermittently for about a year, and then got offered a job by one of his clients, so that they could stop paying him that hourly rate. When it was all over, he figured that he'd banked three years' salary in the course of 18 months, and, while he was earning slightly less than he had before, he also was no longer commuting into a job, and the lifestyle advantages of that more than made up for the 7-8% salary haircut that he took. Also, his benefits from his redundancy package bridged him most of the way to when his new benefits kicked in, so he was never out of pocket for dentistry or anything like that. 

 

Yes, I've seen that happen.  It will be a little different for me though.  My branch of IT is highly specialised and built around centralised enterprise office environments (cubicle farms).  This market has been pole-axed by COVID-19 and most likely won't be coming back which is why the firm is taking irreversible decisions on resourcing.  Most of our direct competitors have already dumped most of their professional services staff. 

Late middle age, white middle aged managers (pale, male and stale) are a bit of a cliche in my world.  There won't be any consulting gigs for quite a while and there will be many, younger software architects in my field asking if you would like fries with that.

I've been employed by this firm for a LONG time and the severance pay will be such that in reality, I don't need to think about money for more than a year.  But i will..

Whatever happens, I'm not going to take any decisions this side of 2021.  I'm going to de-compress and I plan to remain in nappies for the duration.  These days are even stranger than I anticipated.

[oznl]

This week was pretty much as advertised and I'm relieved that it's nearly over: a ghastly series of meetings with staff and HR discussing termination payments, separation dates and the thin methadone-dose of “executive outplacement services” followed by my own grim HR meetings.  All of this culminated yesterday in a hideous charade of a “team Zoom meeting” (should have called it an “ex-team Zoom meeting” whereby I get to announce the dissolution of my team and the departure into unemployment of most of its members (including me) to a few shell-shocked survivors with HR and a director, hovering muted in the background in case I go too far off script.   I have terminated a collective 80 years of experience.

Yep, it’s been a great week.  I’ve had so little sleep that I’ve taken an interim decision to give up driving until I can get my fatigue back under control.

As per the policy of large corporations, I remain theoretically “at work” for several more weeks and so remain chained to my home-office desk.  I’ll be on DD a LOT.  There is nothing else for me to do apart from disentangle myself from a company I’ve worked at for nearly a quarter of a century.

On the nappy front, there is very little to report other than I’m still diapered 24/7.

It’s possibly a function of the fact that I’ve had a hell of a lot weighing on my mind this week but for the most part, I’ve completely lost nappy awareness.  Nappies are invariably wet when I change them but mostly, I cannot specifically recall doing it, even the day ones lately.  I’m not incontinent, it’s just that wetting has faded into the background to the point where I don’t bother laying down memory about it.

During the day, I know that I’m frequently conscious of allowing release in very small amounts fairly frequently as it happens but I couldn’t tell you about any specific episode.  At change time, it always seems like the total is greater than the sum of the parts I can recall.  During the night, periods of “leaving the tap open” seem to be getting longer.  The “clench” reflex seems almost gone although it will close left to its own devices in its own good time.  I suspect that falling asleep with that tap open (which it seems I can now sometimes do) can be a precursor to some kind of pee dream in which I suspect I leak a little.

I’ve been spending longer periods in cloth as I’m not going anywhere and I’m trying to rotate all of my cloth nappies through a soak in the “Rockin’ green” diaper funk remover stuff (ammonia bouncer) that I eventually ordered as per  @BlakeJordan's advice.  I changed into a cloth Babykins pull-on this morning and will remain in cloth (not the same one, I will change!) until Saturday morning.  Making my cloth nappies less objectionable to my partner is an important precursor to being able to use them more frequently.

It turns out I have way more cloth nappies than I thought I did so I’ve yet to actually road-test an ammonia-bounced nappy as I’m still working my way through candidates for cleansing.  I will report back on efficacy.

[Stroller]

Sorry to hear about your job problems, oznl.  I hope you find a new direction OK.  I took early retirement in my mid-50s and never looked back, but then we could afford for that to happen.  I had to leave my last job one way or another as they were gradually offshoring the work to India.  I got a package that paid my wages for the best part of a year while I stayed at home doing no work for them.  I just got used to it - we had kids at home still then, and I became a house-husband.  I'd intended to find work contracting, which would have been easy enough, but in the end I chose not to, and we just reduced our spending and managed to get by OK until my pensions started.  We'd already paid off the house, or I'd have had to find work.