Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

15 hours ago, Newbee said:

Hi oznl 

so now that you have been in diapers 24/7 for so long now do you think you could go back to wearing normal underwear or do you think you have reached a point where it’s too late.

Interesting question.  For nights I suspect NOT.  There's just too much bedwetting going on now.  During the day, possibly, but I suspect it would require some training now with the attendant risk of accidents.

12 hours ago, WBxx said:

Dear Mr oznl (cannot receive messages)

 

Thanks for the heads-up, turns out that somebody sent me a message that flipped my inbox to 100% of quota but there isn't an obvious warning that his has happened.  Annoyingly, the message was spam from a professional "Mommy" (who'd not taken the time to work out that a professional "Mommy" was NOT anywhere on my list of desires).

I've pruned it.

As for the product, Babykins have been mail-bombing me with the vinyl-covered terries assuring me that they are great for wearing over disposables in bed.

Who'd have thunk that?

I do wonder where and how they stumbled onto that idea.

[oznl]

Popular narrative has it that the 24/7 nappy life is a sun-dappled bicycle ride through an enchanted forest where rainbow ponies and unicorns smile and laugh joyously, offering cupcakes and lemonade in a warm celebration of your very own lived destiny.

In fact sometimes it just sucks. 

This week it sucked a lot.  Things had started out badly enough with (what at least appeared to be) a bedwetting drought.  Lately it seems that ANY attempt to divine bedwetting by going to bed dry has failed. 

Suitably-refreshed on a Friday night, I fell into bed in a dubiously-well-installed Babykins pull-up cloth nappy and plastic pants only to wake up at 3:30am dry as a bone.  I didn’t even know I could GO 4.5 hours without peeing.  I’d made a point to have a glass of water before bed in an effort to counteract the vat of red wine I’d drunk but to no avail.

I managed to manually wet myself a little, largely out of a sense of duty but it’s just not the same.  When I eventually arose at 8am on Saturday, my nappy was 70% dry.  Really the only way I knew I was even a bit wet was the fact that things felt a little bit prickly and irritated down there in the nappy zone.   Great…

I cannot fathom where all Friday’s beer and red wine I drank went.  Understanding as I do (albeit at a superficial level) Einstein’s E=mc2 equation, if I’d somehow metabolised it into pure energy I’d expect to have noticed more damage to our living room.

It was therefore ironic that the Abena and Abrilet booster combo that I changed into was leaking by 1pm.  Less than two hours into gardening I realised that I had a wet thigh.  Another epic win for Abena.  I couldn’t even clearly remember using the sodden thing.  It was also another important clue that I hadn’t turned all that booze into energy after all.

In addition to the insult of the wet thigh, the injury part followed with the re-ignition of sunburn and itching from deep inside my nappy zone.  There was definitely some rash action.

It was hours before I was due a change.  I made it last by a combination of remaining outdoors and persistent, less-than-visually-subtle pants re-arranging before. 

Upon changing (early), I unsurprisingly found that one of the tapes had let go and the whole sodden affair had spent much of the day flopping around ineffectively inside my plastic pants.

Needing a nappy that only needed to survive a 5 hour shift before changing into a far more substantive cloth night nappy, I deployed one of my dwindling supply of Molicare “Elastic”.  These are more of a pee-band-aid than a proper nappy:  little more than a capacious booster pad secured with a paper-elastic belt type affair around ones waist.  Although the nappy core is reasonably solid, there is limited geographic coverage and zero “plan B” for any pee that escapes the padded zone.

This segued into the next issue:  I find it impossible to tell that my nappy is leaking whilst sitting in an armchair until I get up out of it.

Accordingly, I hauled myself upright at around 10:30pm to discover my shorts were in fact soaked.  So were my compression pants and quel horreur, there was even a slight puddle in the seat of the chair.  I don’t even know when that happened.  Thank the deity of your choice for durable, wipe-able leather.

I threw pee soaked clothing into my laundry nappy bucket.

Another cloth night nappy (hauled up over my pee-damp and still-irritated skin) saw me wake dry at midnight.  I wet myself a little and fell back asleep.  At this point, the pee fairy must have felt sorry for me because after that I slept through until 7am, waking with a thoroughly wet bum and vague memories of some kind of pee dream.  I took some solace in this evidence that despite the drought, I was in no operational state to dispense with night nappies.

The next morning, I’d put myself back in an Abena with a booster under plastic pants and compression shorts (yes, having dispensed with E=MC2, I thought I’d explore the Einsteinian definition of insanity by doing the same thing and expecting a different result) when my beloved decided we should head off to a shopping mall together to shamble around aimlessly.  This she calls “leisure”.

My relatively reduced level of insight into how much I’ve “used” my nappies hove into view only when I got out of the car in the centre car park and realised how damp and saggy things were already in the underwear zone.  I felt, well, wet…  And droopy.  And it wasn’t even lunchtime.

I became acutely aware of when I was using my nappy.  I knew better than to try and hold off my peeing though.  The trick doesn’t work so well anymore and experience has taught me that it’s better to let things drip and dribble freely than to try to stay dry and instead subjecting my nappy to a short, sharp deluge and a greatly enhanced chance of leaks.  I really don’t know that I have much holding power anyway these days.

Trudging around behind her on some ineffable quest for even more shoes I wasn’t comfortable.

Between my legs my nappy was soggily slapping from side to side in how I imagine wearing a not-quite-dead-yet fish in my underwear would feel like.  All too frequently, I was pausing to haul my gear back up around my hips to try in an effort to feel a little more “warm” and a little less “wet”.

My not-quite-nappy-rash was itching and irritated down there, again.  Rummaging around for a good scratch inside one’s wet nappy isn’t really an option at a mall.

The irony of my circumstance was writ large before me as I waited for her outside the Ladies toilets whilst surreptitiously trying to work out if I was leaking into my pants yet.  We’d taken MY car and accordingly, there WAS a spare nappy hidden away in a storage compartment but the amount of social capital I’d have to expend in taking time out for a mid-mall nappy change would doubtless be intimidating.  So I soldiered on.

Then of course, we had to sit down (in my case, squish down) on a hard bench and have lunch together.  How the seat of my jeans (and the bench) remained dry I do not know.

Before long, I was uncomfortably squelching my way behind her back to the carpark, slightly duck-walking and all the time worrying about visible leaks from my heavy and hopelessly sagging underpants that were desperately trying to slide wetly down my thighs.  I could feel that my plastic pant leggings were wet and that’s always a warning.  Every 10 seconds it seemed another short burst of pee appeared.    I added “worried” to my current status of “uncomfortable”.  Since we’d taken MY car, there was in fact a spare nappy stashed away in a secret compartment but the expenditure of social capital on my beloved in deploying it would have been incalculable.

As I gingerly lowered myself into the car seat, As a kind of Kafkaesque bonus, I caught an unmistakable whiff of “wet nappy”.

Great.  I was not only wet and uncomfortable, I could now be smelled.  I tried to decide if I was more concerned about the risk of my beloved raising an olfactory objection or the risk that she was ignoring it for me to be smelt by others.

The sheer awkward inconvenience alloyed with the risk of shattering embarrassment in this whole charade loomed large before me as I glumly contemplated a contingency plan to retire another Abena nappy early.

I made it home.  Approaching the laundry carrying yet-more pee-dampened apparel, I could smell my wet cloth nappies from the previous couple of nights unambiguously.  Despite a generous rinse before gentle repose in a covered bucket, less-than-subtle ammonia notes were appearing.   I considered blaming the cat.

I covered the bucket as best as I could intending to run the wash in the morning.

This next premature change left me with the dilemma of how to plug the 7 hour gap between my badly-needed, early 4pm nappy change and bed time without soaking another set of pants and a chair.

In an epiphany, it occurred to me that this whole peeing-in-your-pants thing hadn’t really been much fun lately.  Rash, smells, pee, wet clothes, logistics.

The whole point of this exercise was to make me happier, not unhappier and I’m not sure that the last week had in any way delivered.  It wasn’t even convenient.  I’d always promised myself that I’d never become a slave to the hedonistic pursuit of my own happiness.

The solution was obvious.

I pulled out a Critter Caboose, fortified it with a bamboo liner to potentiate wicking better, slathered on some rash cream and diapered up with plastic pants and clean/dry compression pants and outerwear.

I then proceeded to drink too much with friends, followed that with a few more red wines with the TV and fell into bed, slept through the night (evidently peeing copiously) and woke up with a bloated nappy but a dry bed, warm, comfortable and wet only in the appropriate places.

The Caboose put in a 16 hour shift and handled more than 2 litres of pee, much of it delivered during my sleep.  It remained gloriously comfortable and sag-free.

For 99.8% of the population of course, the solution would have been to come OUT of nappies, dry out, take a break and de-tox.

I guess I’m one of the 0.2%

[ozziebee]

I know the feeling of nappies swaying  underneath, needing changed.  Betterdry love doing this, with the clumping of the wet padding accentuating the sway and feels down there, and the tapes stretched and moved across the front wings to the point they're almost about to disconnect.

What I have discovered these past few months is cloth nappies, and how gloriously comfortable they are.  I'm using the Rearz prefolds with terry towel square nappies as inserts, snappies, netting pant over the top (to protect the plastic pants from errant sharp snappi claws), and plastic pants over the top.  I'm in love with this combo.  It's a bulky and puffy combo though.  Washing is an issue with these big prefolds, so I wash every few days, but pre-rinse the used cloth nappies in the interim.   What I'd like to know is what products you're using to wash your cloth nappies, PP's and such.

I'm so used to these cloth nappies now, that I'm not liking the feel and coverage of disposables.

Oh, and I drove up your way on the weekend, Oz.  I put on a Barry before I left, and by the time I arrived on the GC, I was soaked... So strange! Disposables all weekend, and looked forward to home and a change back into cloth.

[oznl]

2 hours ago, ozziebee said:

What I'd like to know is what products you're using to wash your cloth nappies, PP's and such.

Good question.  Some might remember that my cloth nappies kind of slipped out of olfactory control early into my 24/7 phase.  It took a degree of trial and erroring to bring things back.

This is what I've learned (the hard way):

• Rinse removed cloth nappies in the shower along with the rinsing oe me
• On my machine (Fisher & Paykel), I turn OFF the “eco mode” before a nappy run.  Otherwise, it skimps on water changes between wash phases.  NOT what we want with nappies.  You NEVER want to see that rinse water again.
• I use a HOT/LONG wash cycle.
• Fairly vanilla laundry detergent (whatever beloved's brand-de-jour is)
• I add a couple of capfuls on Canestan wash anti-bacterial additive to the fabric dispenser
• If possible, I line-dry in the sun (for the cloth nappies, don’t do this to plastic – especially in QLD!)

Those multi-layer cloth products (I only have one pre-fold but I have a few Rearz Omutsu) are indeed a PITA to get dry properly.  The tumble dryer seems to be no substitute for the great outdoors and slightly-damp nappies can provoke bacteria colonisation which is what makes them smell bad the moment they get wet.

They will still get rank in their "pre-wash" bucket if air gets to them or they are there too long but the wash will now fix it.

2 hours ago, ozziebee said:

I'm so used to these cloth nappies now, that I'm not liking the feel and coverage of disposables.

I prefer cloth.  I VASTLY prefer cloth at night (last night was pinned terries).  I use disposables to manage workplace and spousal expectations.

2 hours ago, ozziebee said:

Oh, and I drove up your way on the weekend, Oz.  I put on a Barry before I left, and by the time I arrived on the GC, I was soaked... So strange! Disposables all weekend, and looked forward to home and a change back into cloth.

That is one hell of a long way for a weekend!  I don't doubt that a Barry could handle the Pacific/New England highway run though.

[Stroller]

5 hours ago, oznl said:

Good question.  Some might remember that my cloth nappies kind of slipped out of olfactory control early into my 24/7 phase.  It took a degree of trial and erroring to bring things back.

This is what I've learned (the hard way):

• Rinse removed cloth nappies in the shower along with the rinsing oe me
• On my machine (Fisher & Paykel), I turn OFF the “eco mode” before a nappy run.  Otherwise, it skimps on water changes between wash phases.  NOT what we want with nappies.  You NEVER want to see that rinse water again.
• I use a HOT/LONG wash cycle.
• Fairly vanilla laundry detergent (whatever beloved's brand-de-jour is)
• I add a couple of capfuls on Canestan wash anti-bacterial additive to the fabric dispenser
• If possible, I line-dry in the sun (for the cloth nappies, don’t do this to plastic – especially in QLD!)

Those multi-layer cloth products (I only have one pre-fold but I have a few Rearz Omutsu) are indeed a PITA to get dry properly.  The tumble dryer seems to be no substitute for the great outdoors and slightly-damp nappies can provoke bacteria colonisation which is what makes them smell bad the moment they get wet.

My routine is similar, but of course not identical...

• I don't change in the shower - I just put the wet nappy in a drybag & transfer it to a lidded bucket as & when I can. I wipe myself down with a wet flannel.
• I wash my nappies every 2 days.  That just fits in the washer, and any longer would mean them getting smelly.  I use a long 60 degree wash.  I use non-bio washing powder & add a couple of caps of anti-bacterial additive.
• I can't line dry as there's nowhere with enough privacy, so I have to use the tumble-dryer.  With my nappies that takes a couple of hours.
• Plastic pants get a daily wash in hot water in the sink - no detergent.

[oznl]

3 hours ago, Stroller said:

My routine is similar, but of course not identical...

• I don't change in the shower - I just put the wet nappy in a drybag & transfer it to a lidded bucket as & when I can. I wipe myself down with a wet flannel.
• I wash my nappies every 2 days.  That just fits in the washer, and any longer would mean them getting smelly.  I use a long 60 degree wash.  I use non-bio washing powder & add a couple of caps of anti-bacterial additive.
• I can't line dry as there's nowhere with enough privacy, so I have to use the tumble-dryer.  With my nappies that takes a couple of hours.
• Plastic pants get a daily wash in hot water in the sink - no detergent.

I actually meant to cite you as an original source sorry!  I simply took your maintenance advice and adapted it to a hotter climate.  You were the one who correctly diagnosed my original problem as bacterial build-up.   I also took @Little Sherri's advice on how to recover the nappies that I'd already nearly-lost to bacterial build up through an engineered dose of bleach.  Once I'd base-lined things back to normal, the revised maintenance regime seems to be sufficient to hold things there.

[oznl]

I believe that my beloved may have taken a veiled swipe at my nappy habit in the company of friends last weekend.

It was late afternoon and we were sitting out on my back deck drinking with a selection of neighbours.  We live in a small cul-de-sac where everybody at the end bit knows each other and has done for years.  It’s quite common for us to sit around punishing our livers together to celebrate the death of another weekend.

One of our friends was complaining about her husband (who happened to be away on business travel for this particular soiree) and his somewhat mission-focused approach to holiday travel.

They were headed up to Noosa (a popular beach destination, normally about two hours’ drive north of here) when, as is quite common, they hit traffic delays because such a large slice of Brisbane’s population also thought going to Noosa sounded nice and decided to join them on the Bruce Highway (yeah, there really IS a Bruce Highway in Australia despite the local state Government tourist board squandering half a million taxpayer dollars failing to re-brand it as “Pacific Coast Way”).

This neighbour needed to pee but her husband was having none of it.

“He just gets target fixation and thinks because HE doesn’t need to stop that nobody else should!”

“Yep, I hear you!” my beloved replied.

Gesticulating across towards me she continued “He’ll NEVER stop for a toilet break, he’ll just keep on driving regardless” before giving me a lingering, meaningful look towards my padded midriff in a “debate THAT claim at your own risk” kind of genre...

[oznl]

On 5/5/2023 at 10:43 AM, ozziebee said:

 I'm using the Rearz prefolds with terry towel square nappies as inserts, snappies, netting pant over the top (to protect the plastic pants from errant sharp snappi claws), and plastic pants over the top.  I'm in love with this combo.  It's a bulky and puffy combo though.

Interesting...  I can see that LDU stocks these.  I was a bit confused by their sizing chart though.  It suggests that a "large" would be plenty for me but my instinct says XL at least.  You've seen me often enough.  Thoughts?  I might try one but I'd rather not screw up the sizing.

Also, how's the side protection?

[Little Sherri]

On 5/6/2023 at 2:31 AM, oznl said:

I believe that my beloved may have taken a veiled swipe at my nappy habit in the company of friends last weekend.

I've experienced this on occasion. Nothing really overt, and you'd have to already be in the know to catch most of them, but I always worry about "evidence stack-up", where seemingly unrelated observations suddenly click together like a line on Tetris, and poof, a theory forms. Sherri very rarely leaves his seat at the bar. Sherri prefers oversized trousers. Once in a blue moon his oversized trousers make a muted "crunching" noise easily attributable to there being something in his pockets, and or display a slightly inexplicable bulge. His wife cracks jokes about his iron bladder and his oversized trousers. Everyone put their shorts on in the parking lot at the golf club, except Sherri, who walked half a kilometer in 35 C weather to the clubhouse in order to change from jeans into shorts in a bathroom stall. Sherri doesn't take pee breaks in the bushes every six holes or so, despite drinking a can of beer for every second hole. His wife jokes at concerts that he can be left to mind everyone's drinks because he never uses the bathroom. Then, one day, a flash of white plastic... click, click, click, everything falls into place. 

But what can you do? My having put myself back in diapers full time really is absurd, and if making me uncomfortable is an occasional source of amusement for her, I guess I've brought that upon myself. Play silly games and you get silly prizes...

[ozziebee]

The Rearz prefolds are constructed in a way that there's a third of the width that quite thick (about 8 or 12 layers of cloth?), and the other two thirds are a bit thinner (maybe 4 or so layers?).  There's stitching around the edges, and along these thirds, down the length of the nappy.   

XL should do you fine.  For these, you want the width.  The rise could be a bit problematic (the XL's are 1.1m long after all), and as a result go a bit higher up the belly than usual, compared to disposables.  It's totally possible though to fix a rise issue by folding the front under itself.  

I use what they call a newspaper fold, to fold these, and some snappies.  Get the snappies from BigW or a baby supply store, as the ones that LDU sell have all failed in the same way for me.  For the netting pants, I've been using the iD Care Net Pants 2XL Orange or 3XL Grey.  These stretch right over the cloth nappy, covering it completely.  As I said, I use these to stop the snappies from moving around and exposing claws which can scratch or put holes in the PP's.  

The side coverage is awesome, if you can tolerate a higher rise than dips give you.  With a higher rise, there's much more scope for the top front sides to overlap under the back top sides.  If you can wrap the width of the nappy around to the point they're almost touching at the front, you'll get good side coverage.  The Rearz prefolds are pretty thick once washed a few times, and this includes the sides.  So you get lots of side layers once they overlap when pinned/snappied on.

I don't like nappies that end up looking like I'm wearing a bikini.  I love those nappies that give me a very high rise granny-style-panty effect.  But, then I need high-rise plastic pants to cover it all up, which is totally ok (I love the look n feel of good PP's).  

Add a onesie to support the whole thing, and you're good to go for quite a while!

[oznl]

On 5/9/2023 at 10:48 AM, ozziebee said:

XL should do you fine.  For these, you want the width.  The rise could be a bit problematic (the XL's are 1.1m long after all), and as a result go a bit higher up the belly than usual, compared to disposables.  It's totally possible though to fix a rise issue by folding the front under itself.  

I use what they call a newspaper fold, to fold these, and some snappies.  Get the snappies from BigW or a baby supply store, as the ones that LDU sell have all failed in the same way for me. 

Target acquired...  I think I have to wash them first before any testing though.

[oznl]

It seems my ability to verify bedwetting on-demand has taken a brief holiday.

I do suspect that I am in fact still bedwetting semi-regularly but what has retreated is my ability to go to bed dry and wake up wet.  I’ve been doing this a couple of nights per week as a bit of a “pulse check” on my bedwetting.  Such wetting that has occurred seems to happen only after I’ve “broken the ice” so to speak by being a bit wet to begin with but of course, I can’t prove it.

This is how things were a couple of years ago, in my early days of permanent nappies.  I thought it was a phase that I’d well and truly gotten beyond by now but it seems the “three steps forwards and two steps back” paradigm of this strange journey never stops.

Last night, having gone to bed deliberately dry, I had a slightly weird non-bedwetting dream that might give some clue what is going on in the mental department. 

In my dream I’d woken up in bed (that was convenient, as I WAS in bed) but instead of my waking-life cloth nappy and pyjamas, I was wearing a nice pair of blue Levi jeans over my last-known-remaining article of conventional underwear: a dilapidated pair of red underpants.  It wasn’t exactly conventional night attire (for me) but this was a dream and at any moment it would be presumably possible that I would transubstantiate into a llama.

Anyway, I was considering dream-wetting my dream-bed in my dream however I was plagued by misgivings towards this otherwise-undoubtedly-awesome idea.

For a start, I was acutely aware that my pants were pristine, clean and dry.  In the light of some ineffable ethical framework, this seemed like a fairly solid reason NOT to pee in them.  To do so would be to irreversibly “break” some kind of state, or cross a line that I could not retreat from and put me in a place where I would inevitably be “found out” .

This was because in my dream I wasn’t safely in a nappy:  I was wearing jeans and underpants.

I knew that peeing in them was going to see things around me get pretty wet pretty quickly.  There was also the thorny question of what my beloved (who in my dream world, just as my waking world, was laying beside me in bed snoring gently) would make of this venture, being highly likely as she was to be one of the first things to get pretty wet pretty quickly.

I can’t recall actually needing to pee but that whole sensation is not one I commonly experience anymore.  Somewhere in my awareness I knew that I could make things wet if I chose to.

I lay there for some time, in a kind of brinkmanship game:  I was making no effort to stay dry, resting on the very edge of wet jeans/bed/spouse but neither had I actually wet myself.

I remained in repose, contemplating the irreversibility of such a decision and the likelihood of subsequent discovery and blame.

At some point, I felt a drop or two appear and somehow knew that my underwear was now the tiniest bit damp but the situation was still quite salvageable.  I could still pass for dry and was committed to nothing.

I woke up at this point.  Presumably the discomfort of resting upon the horns of this dilemma was incompatible with sleep. 

It was 2am and a manual check suggested that my nappy was indeed dry.  There MAY have been a drop in there or it might have just been a bit sweaty.  In any case, I was NOT what I’d call “wet”.

Sighing inwardly, I went ahead and used my nappy.  There really wasn’t that much pee at all in me but nevertheless I was now unambiguously wet.

I fell back asleep. 

The next morning, I was more substantially wet and upon waking, quite empty-bladdered.  I couldn’t remember peeing more but I was wet enough to suggest that having crossed the Rubicon of making myself wet, my bladder spent the rest of the night set to “automatic” and I peed in my sleep.

Make of THAT what you will.

[ozziebee]

Hehe, so unconscious brain needed to work through the ethical issues of pants wetting, and chose that night to do it.  Interesting.

I'm still stubbornly not autonomously night-wetting (well, not that I can detect), and am waking with an uncomfortable feeling as an indicator that I needed to pee.  However, I am experiencing more frequent episodes of waking up into what I am thinking is a lucid state and recognising that I'm already in the process of wetting.  The wetting continues unabated until "something happens".  Which may be that I wonder whether my nappy will leak, or a drop of pee moves across my skin into an area where pee would not normally go (like up my butt crack and onto my lower back, which instantly brings up thoughts of leaking nappy, wet bed etc), and I wake up completely at that point, which  stops the flow.

Is this the pre-cursor to a life of bedwetting?   I rarely have pee dreams, and almost never have dreams where I am in nappies.  When I was going through my periods during COVID lockdowns where I wasn't wearing nappies, I'd have such dreams.  My brain seems to be unconsciously quite satisfied that I am ensconced in a nappy.

I do go to bed wet.  I've not woken up dry in a very long time when wearing nappies.  

When my alarm wakes me in the morning, and after I wake up from my late afternoon nap, I immediately wet.  Sometimes a lot, sometimes not.  

[oznl]

5 minutes ago, ozziebee said:

Hehe, so unconscious brain needed to work through the ethical issues of pants wetting, and chose that night to do it.  Interesting.

Maybe...  Although I've already wet a dry nappy (or even dry pyjamas) in my sleep plenty of times now.  There just seems to have been some recent regression in this "skill".  It's possible that by institutionalising the practice of "test nights" has (on these nights) elevated the psychological import of a first-wetting event to such that it wakes me before occurring.

There's also some other physiological stuff going on with respect to my rapidly deteriorating void strength which may also be a factor although I'm fairly sure that I've been intermittently sleep-wetting on those nights where I go to bed already damp.

9 minutes ago, ozziebee said:

 However, I am experiencing more frequent episodes of waking up into what I am thinking is a lucid state and recognising that I'm already in the process of wetting. 

For me this has been a common alternative to a full sleep-wetting event: something about the physical sensation of wetting brings me into awareness.  As I wake up, I realise that I'm peeing in my nappy although at this stage, the clench reflex is absent so I'd usually just note the fact and fall back asleep (sometimes I suspect, whilst still peeing leaving me in the morning with just a glimmer of memory that I became aware of a wetting event at some point during the night).

11 minutes ago, ozziebee said:

Is this the pre-cursor to a life of bedwetting?  

In my experience, yes, but the trick is not to grab a hold of it and try to analyse or replicate the behaviour.  Like mould on a mattress, it seems to grow best in the dark.  Ignore it.

Do you like how I'm giving advice that I'm clearly not following myself right now 🤣

14 minutes ago, ozziebee said:

Which may be that I wonder whether my nappy will leak, or a drop of pee moves across my skin into an area where pee would not normally go (like up my butt crack and onto my lower back, which instantly brings up thoughts of leaking nappy, wet bed etc), and I wake up completely at that point, which  stops the flow.

I actually CANNOT do this anymore.  Once the flow has started, it stops when it stops.

Yesterday I got into my car for the commute home, almost immediately peed (I'd "permitted" this event) and almost just-as-instantly realised that my Barry was a little overwhelmed and I could feel a rivulet of pee escaping out one side at my crotch to drain into my plastic pants and before very long at all, my jeans...

Against all "24/7" rules, I clenched as hard as I could, planning to at least reposition myself.

The clench did momentarily slow the flow but I could not stop it and it reverted to normal pace within a second or two after an extremely uncomfortable bladder spasm. 

I doubt this is normal but what was I expecting to happen?

[BabyJilly_S]

She is a fickle mistress, this bedwetting. Currently I appear to be on a 3 day win streak, of going to bed having a full nights sleep and weaking up wet. A pleasant change from waking up for a reposition, though even that is better than having to get up....

But I am reaalllly trying not to analyse it. It genuinely is Schrodingers cat... 

[ozziebee]

I think I have my first piece of evidence that I had a bedwetting event. It didnt happen overnight, but this afternoon when I had a sleep after logging off from work.

I work from home, and treat myself to a sleep for a few hours after work. I’ve been wearing cloth nappies for about 4 weeks now, and so was wearing one, relatively fresh too after changing about 2pm. 

My sleep this arvo was full of dreams, and at one point towards the end of my sleep I woke up feeling pee trickling along the small of my back. It felt strange, but similar to other times I’d been lying on my side and had a wetting happen. It didn’t feel like it was from press out, and I’d not experienced such before when on my side. 

The only explanation is that I’d wet in my sleep, with the event over or right on finishing as I woke up. A couple of minutes later, the alarm I’d set to wake me up went off. 

Interesting!  

I don’t remember any urges beforehand - I was sound asleep. 

I am experiencing immediate releases on waking up from overnight, and after my afternoon siestas. I wonder now whether this new event will become more frequent too. 

[Little Sherri]

On 5/10/2023 at 3:19 AM, oznl said:

Target acquired...  I think I have to wash them first before any testing though.

Definitely. I think Rearz published a guide to cloth diapers somewhere, maybe on their blog, where they said you have to wash and dry them at least twice before even considering wearing them, and that they reach peak performance after something like 5 - 8 wash and dry cycles. I'd even fire up the clothes dryer for a couple of the cycles, to get everything fluffed up as much as possible (I know you use your geographic latitude to your advantage for a lot of your clothes drying needs). 

On 5/12/2023 at 12:14 AM, oznl said:

Against all "24/7" rules, I clenched as hard as I could, planning to at least reposition myself.

The clench did momentarily slow the flow but I could not stop it and it reverted to normal pace within a second or two after an extremely uncomfortable bladder spasm. 

This coincides entirely with my lived experience. There is no stopping the train once it gets rolling. 

I'm staying at my parents' place right now for a few nights at least, because my stepdad is in the hospital, and my sister has been here as well for a lot of the time. In a way, I have replicated the conditions of my original bedwetting environment, except my brother is sleeping 22 stories above the ground in a condo 5000 km's away, instead of on the bunk above me. But I'm wearing diapers to bed that are usually a little wet by the time the lights go out. So far, nothing, nada. I've woken up a couple of times at 6 am needing to pee, and done so, and a couple of times, I've simply woken up when the alarm went off, no wetter than I was when I went to bed, so far as I can determine. You'd think my situation would be fertile soil for diaper dreams, or dreams of some sort, but, nope. I'm not even drinking much, and yet I'm sleeping like the dead. Although sipping on a vat of red wine would make all of this a little more tolerable, and, might facilitate nocturnal diaper usage. I'll have to go buy wine, though - they prefer quantity over quality here. 

[oznl]

17 hours ago, ozziebee said:

I think I have my first piece of evidence that I had a bedwetting event. It didnt happen overnight, but this afternoon when I had a sleep after logging off from work.

I work from home, and treat myself to a sleep for a few hours after work. I’ve been wearing cloth nappies for about 4 weeks now, and so was wearing one, relatively fresh too after changing about 2pm. 

My sleep this arvo was full of dreams, and at one point towards the end of my sleep I woke up feeling pee trickling along the small of my back. It felt strange, but similar to other times I’d been lying on my side and had a wetting happen. It didn’t feel like it was from press out, and I’d not experienced such before when on my side. 

The only explanation is that I’d wet in my sleep, with the event over or right on finishing as I woke up. A couple of minutes later, the alarm I’d set to wake me up went off. 

Interesting!  

I don’t remember any urges beforehand - I was sound asleep. 

I am experiencing immediate releases on waking up from overnight, and after my afternoon siestas. I wonder now whether this new event will become more frequent too. 

Congratulations (I think, assuming this is what you want, the bedwetting, not the "nana naps" 🤣).  I do recall many similar blurred events during the transition.  Interestingly, in my case too, bedwetting events seem to be quite unrelated to bursting bladders (and modest in volume).  In fact if I've over-hydrated,  I'm more likely to wake up.

[oznl]

A disturbance in the space/time continuum has catapulted a case of Barrys (Rearz Incontrol Elite Hybrid) to me from the past…

Nappy cognoscenti will of course be aware that some months ago, Rearz developed “new” sizes and “new” fits for their products.  My initial scepticism arising from the tidal economic forces of cost-cutting and shrink-flation being generously painted over by marketing BS however turned out to be unfounded.

Whilst the “new/improved” Rearz “Large” was indeed slightly smaller and with a snugger fit, it not only fit well but the issue of minor end-of-day leaks appearing at the rear right thigh seemed to mitigate quite substantially if not outright disappear.

Thusly reassured, I marched forward into a brave new future with drier jeans.

Things did get a little bit wobbly however as my nappy supplier then ran out of Barrys because of, well, because that’s the way the world doesn’t work anymore.

Eventually however, a fresh container arrived from China.

Gratefully unpacking my new case into my nappy cupboard at home, it occurred to me that the labels on these “new” Barrys were the same colour as the pre-shrinkage Barry formula.

My suspicions were further aroused when the first time I put them on, I discovered that the “large” Barry needed to be taped on at its absolutely smallest tape landing mark possible to fit me.  Flattering though thi is,  I am NOT a “bottom end of the large / could possibly get away with medium” kind of guy.  I’m LARGE and it’s all I can do to stay out of “Extra Large” territory.

When I noticed the cool damp patch at the back of my right jeans leg at around 3pm I knew for sure.

These were “old school” sized Barrys and something about their fit at my arse means that despite having loads of absorptive capacity remaining, they’d rather dump pee at my inner crotch into my plastic pants before, after a brief delay, it finds its way out to my jeans.

Suddenly, it’s winter 2022 all over again.

It must be that team China found some up the back of the warehouse and decided to send them downunder where they thought we’d all be too drunk or distracted by wrestling kangaroos to notice.

Now I have two more packs to burn through before I roll the dice and hope the next ones are new fit.  I’m not really enjoying the near-daily-slightly-damp jeans.

[oznl]

Winter has arrived early (such as winter is in my part of the world - it's more about chilly nights but dry, sunny, slightly warm days.

Last night I went to bed in a pinned terry cloth nappy.  I was damp when I went to bed but soaked when I woke up with an empty bladder so I'm calling it a bedwetting night.  I had zero recollection of peeing overnight.

The good thing though, thick terry nappies are great insulators.  Although wet, the heavy warmth was for the first time this season, a great comfort rather than the price of admission to the dance.

I did smile to myself as my beloved sighed and hauled herself out of bed to visit the bathroom at 6am.  It was 9C outside and as usual, she'd flung open all the windows so it was most likely 9C in the bedroom too.   Even the sheets were cool but it remained 30C plus inside my underwear all night.

[oznl]

I slept like a baby last night.   I don’t know HOW I did this (I’m an appalling sleeper) but I desperately want to do it again.

I’d been reasonably physically active across the day.  The evening was non-descript but also alcohol free.

I went to bed a little after 10:30pm. I remember glancing at the clock beside the bed and realising that it was 10:55pm.

I looked at the clock again: 5:56am.  The alarm would be going off in 4 minutes.

The room was cold but I was warm in bed but I was strangely ok with that.  It felt, well, like time to get up anyway. 

I was completely empty-bladdered and it seemed that I’d peed myself through the night.  My night nappy (which was damp upon retiring) was now more thoroughly wet as one might expect from a “next morning night nappy” but remained warm and leak free.

I had absolutely zero recollection of using it.  I could vaguely recall dreams but they weren’t pee dreams.  I had no recollection of waking at all.  I just realised how swollen and heavy it was by the time I woke.

I arose, showered and changed refreshed.

I’d like another night like that please…  In fact I'd like ALL my nights to be like this one.

I just wish that the cruel lesson of history whereby any progress is matched by regress could just take a holiday and I could stay this way.

Bedwetting in decent nappies is completely awesome.  Who'd have thought it?

[BabyJilly_S]

7 hours ago, oznl said:

I was completely empty-bladdered and it seemed that I’d peed myself through the night.  My night nappy (which was damp upon retiring) was now more thoroughly wet as one might expect from a “next morning night nappy” but remained warm and leak free.

I had absolutely zero recollection of using it.  I could vaguely recall dreams but they weren’t pee dreams.  I had no recollection of waking at all.  I just realised how swollen and heavy it was by the time I woke.

I’d like another night like that please…  In fact I'd like ALL my nights to be like this one.

This! soo much this...  

[WBxx]

Worth noting -
1)   I’d been reasonably physically active across the day.
2)  The room was cold

[oznl]

Quite recently (a couple of weeks ago but I haven’t really had time to write about it), my beloved and I reached a life milestone that packed a bigger psychological punch than either of us had anticipated.

The last kid left home and we joined the echoingly quiet halls of “empty nesters”.

Apart from the odd alloy of freedom and emptiness that comes with no longer being responsible for the noisy and let’s face it, needy progeny that filled now-silent rooms, our house suddenly seems VERY big.  The house was always very big, it’s just that kids had such a way of occupying it that I was always left feeling that having another west wing or perhaps, an indoor bowling alley might be a good thing.  Now it’s just enormous.

There’s also the strange new reality I’m getting used to that food and drink in the refrigerator tends to remain there until either my beloved or I consume it or, after several days decomposing gently under cling-wrap, we throw it out.  For decades, we’d both assumed that these things simply de-materialised once put in the fridge, only leaving empty bottles and plates as surviving evidence of their transient existence.

It’s such an odd feeling.  This is the end of practically thirty years of servitude.  Three decades where basically, my beloved and I lived to serve.

What next and in particular, what does this mean for me and my strange journey?

On the face of it, the removal of the cardinal-sin-risk of traumatising our progeny by exposing them to my nappies or related infrastructure would signal party time.  It’s time for me to cavort up and down the halls wearing the bulkiest nappies conceivable, free from censure or reproach and perhaps changing myself on the living room floor.

Or not…

It is true that I’ve had a weekend’s worth of cloth nappies drying on a clothes rack in (one of) the spare rooms and they’ve neither been hidden, removed or the subject of specific marital censure but given that our cat almost certainly has dementia, the departure of all of our children has left me as the only other sentient being in the house.  In terms of “things to interact with”, I’m now the only game in town.

Bereft of offspring within eye-line, I find her lingering in my presence for a lot longer.  At least until her smart phone buzzes (if I ever find myself in the circumstance of receiving CPR from her and one of the kids sends her a text message, I’m dead….)

Operationally however, I find myself forced to prepare for nappy changes under her direct (and faintly disapproving) gaze because she simply has no particular reason to leave our bedroom.

There’s also the question of leisure time.

Suddenly things are catapulted back to where they were when we seemed little more than teenagers.  Old behavioural patterns are reappearing like long-submerged villages from a valley dammed and flooded decades ago in pursuit of 24/7 parenthood.   One of this that I instantly recognised with a faint tinge of dismay is that in addition to being provider and domestic engineer, I was also the master of ceremonies for all weekend activities.

Despite a century of feminism and my beloved’s intense interest in all things equality, she regarded it as my job to plan, and then implement suitable entertainment activities for her.

“Weekend activities” have been almost entirely child-centric for a very long time and parenthood being a field of endeavour for which she regarded me as eminently unqualified, I have largely been left to my own devices.

Not anymore.  Ergo the muted velocity of updates.

As I’m writing this now, she’s happily unpacking a cupboard for reasons I could not fathom.  I’m all too aware however that this diversion is at best a 30 minute one and soon she will appear in my study to ask me to which mall I shall be taking her today.

Colour me compressed…

[Stroller]

4 hours ago, oznl said:

The last kid left home and we joined the echoingly quiet halls of “empty nesters”.

It's a big change.  We were there temporarily for three years, once our younger daughter went off to university.  Then she came back, and has been here with us for the past two years.  There are signs that she might be off again soon though.  We ended up with operating in two different states, depending on whether it was just the two of us in the house...

On our own:

I can prance around the house in a nappy all I want, I never lock the bathroom door, Teddy is often downstairs on the sofa in the day, dummy in my mouth whenever I feel like it.  Mummy brings me a bottle of warm milk when she comes to bed and feeds me.  Mummy is totally OK with all this.  My wet nappies live in a drybag in the bathroom, & I take them down to buckets by the washing machine each morning.

With offspring around:

Dressing gown needed when I head for the bathroom, bathroom door locked, Teddy stays under the covers (though not really hidden).  My dummy is in my pocket and rarely comes out during the day.  I take my own glass of milk up at bedtime - my bedtime remains at 10pm, and Mummy makes sure I stick to it unless there's something special on the telly.  Wet nappies now live in the secret cupboard under the bath, and I sneak them down when I can.

We're planning to head off for a week's camping next weekend, just the two of us with Binky (dog).  That should work fine I think.  I'll switch into disposables for the week.  If either of the kids were around for that there would be a lot of anxiety on both our parts - there's not much room to hide things when you're camping.  Every noise stretches for miles, every bag is near to everyone else.  I have to say though that it's a lot easier to keep things private from adult kids than from young kids - once they're older they respect privacy more, and we can give them their own privacy more easily too.