Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Three Rivers]

Yes, being an empty nester has it's benefits. I can go around the house in just a diaper and a t-shirt, but I always have a pair of shorts nearby in case the front door has a visitor. My spouse doesn't care if I'm in a diaper or not, but if she has a trip planned for the day, she will tell me that I need to change and get ready to go. You miss the kids at first, and yes the house seems bigger and quieter. You can walk around with no cloths on, leave the bathroom door open, get up in the middle of the night and walk to the kitchen naked and no one cares. After a while it just seems the norm and your lifestyle just readjusts to the new environment. Congratulations on becoming an empty nester.

[oznl]

Further distressing evidence emerged this week that a certain degree #2 control suffers as collateral damage in strange ventures such as mine.

Again, I blame the chickens.  It was the last day on duty for the chicken stir-fry I’d made on the weekend and I’d enjoyed chicken a la microwave for lunch at one of my rare opportunities to have lunch at the office as opposed to eating out of cardboard in a company vehicle somewhere.

It tasted fine but by late afternoon, I’d become aware of some minor churning going on and the occasional intestinal cramp.

It was as I was leaving the office for the day, just out the door into the carpark when suddenly my innards made a noise remarkably like a gurgling drain.  In a flash of epiphany, I had a vision of a gleaming, porcelain throne resplendent in its immaculate glass-and-ceramic temple, bathed in a brilliant, white sanitising light and caressed by freshly-crisp, clean, lemon-scented air.

Then I remembered that our staff toilet was more “Moscow 1954”.

Then I realised that there’d been a small-but-certain quantity of, uh, seepage in the seat of my by-now-well-soggy day nappy concomitant with that cramp.  I now had a small-but-ominous sticky sensation at ground zero.

I suspected it was only minor but it would make any effort at removing and replacing a nappy in the staff toilet infinitely more complex, infinitely more dangerous and infinitely less attractive.

I decided it was tiny and some pressure had clearly been relieved so I’d just sit in it, drive home and deal with the situation when I got there using a convenience more in line with my idealised one which now included a hot shower.

Settling into the driver’s seat, I cramped again.  I wasn’t too concerned.  Sitting directly on my padded backside would generally plug any further action at least until I next arose.

Not today.

There ensued what could loosely (and I use the term guardedly) described as a contained barnyard explosion.  The seat beneath me merely dispersed the blast.  It did not subdue it.  Any hope of getting away with disposing of this nappy indoors disappeared in a puff of methane.

There being by now NO real alternative, I put the car into drive and headed for home anyway.  I briefly considered the “unclean underwear” scenario forewarned by countless matriarchs in the event of a motor vehicle accident and decided to drive extra-carefully.

Not five minutes in to my shortish commute, another wave of cramping hit.  There being nothing left to defend as far as I could see, I just let it happen.

It happened again on the freeway before I felt a curious-and-quite-disturbing sensation of sickeningly warm fluid percolating up towards the small of my back.  I tried to stop adding to the scale of the disaster but to no avail.

This was nasty.

After what seemed a few days of my best accident-avoiding driving, I made it home (which was mercifully empty except for me) and duck-waddled upstairs to the bathroom for a confronting experience. 

Undressing was like unwrapping a horrible Christmas present.  Each layer of wrapping removed that was uncontaminated was a small blessing but was also a step closer to something one really did not want.

My jeans were ok but the problems started at the very next layer in.

Working from bottom up (me so funny), my nappy had unsurprisingly failed to contain this experience at all rendering the inside of my plastic pants, well, hideous.  The plastic pants, keen to punt the problem elsewhere had managed to extrude content out through the leg elastics taking the black compression shorts I wore over them out of action as well.  Up at the ceiling of my nappy zone, seepage at the small off my back had even managed to make it to my shirt.  

Attempting to remove my plastic pants in the genre one might expect from bomb disposal, small blobs of unspeakable goo fell out on to the bathroom floor.  Cue a secondary clean-up starring bleach.

I spent 20 minutes in a battle with Beelzebub’s curry in our ensuite bathroom, nervously glancing at the clock every minute or two to track when my beloved was likely to return.  On completion, I flung open every window and prayed for a tornado.  I considered how I might launch the used nappy into a low-earth orbit.

None of this was in ANY way attractive to me.

It remains the case that bowel control remains as usable as it was in the “before” times UNLESS there are aggravating circumstances.  Once vengeful chickens have amassed, all bets are off despite whatever I might think I want.

You have been warned.

[Little Sherri]

2 hours ago, oznl said:

I spent 20 minutes in a battle with Beelzebub’s curry in our ensuite bathroom, nervously glancing at the clock every minute or two to track when my beloved was likely to return. 

I feel for you, my friend, so I feel a bit guilty in reporting that I literally laughed out loud at this recounting of your descent into one of Dante's unpublished circles of hell. You have a gift. 

A vision of what you described is what has stopped me, on a couple of occasions, from leaning into the fact that I wear diapers all the time, to deal with the inconvenience of my intestines pulling the fire alarm. Doing so would only lead to greater inconvenience, as you have confirmed. I am recalling in particular, one flight home from a Caribbean paradise, where I'd been poisoned the night before by a grouper steak in a delectable sauce. Evidently, I hadn't poured enough red wine on top of it to kill whatever lifeform had populated it. I spent the morning from 6 AM gripping the sides of the toilet seat to prevent myself from being propelled upward by the torrent, while dubiously eyeing the gossamer-thin local toilet paper brand. I needed to be in the lobby by 9, to be at the airport by 10. For the first time ever, I had ZERO concern that my diaper might be spotted by their version of the TSA - I was more concerned that they'd interpret my pallid, sweat-soaked face as evidence that I had contraband stashed internally, and that some of it was leaking. 

I white-knuckled the flight home, knowing that if I let anything other than a thin trickle of pee free itself from my person, we'd end up making an emergency landing somewhere, and I'd be asked to deplane. 

[BabyJilly_S]

I  can echo @Little Sherri in that i chuckled (due to your prose) over the events as described, I dont envy you. 

Though I think you can take solace in the fact you had mild food poisoning and count yourself lucky that you were, in fact, well padded. Had you not been in this "club", the consequences would have been far more dire....  

 

 

[oznl]

I don’t even hike.   So why the protracted bout of mental self-flagellation about all of the challenges that would arise if, in repudiation of the habits of a lifetime, I found a pair of hiking boots and hit the trails?

It isn’t reasonable to torture myself thusly.  Regrettably, my mind only does “reason” some of the time, the rest devoted the roiling, irrational sea of emotion that seems an inescapable symptom of living as a bag of meat in a physical world.

This most recent bout of self-inflicted regret was triggered by my beloved’s decision that we should watch the movie adaptation of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In The Woods” (ATITW).  I’m generally not keen on watching movies about books that I’ve already read.  They are so often disappointing to me (with notable exceptions such as Mario Puzo’s “Godfather” and the 2021 effort at Frank Herbert’s “Dune”).

If you haven’t read the book (and I recommend that you DO), AWITW is a semi-autobiographical account of Bill taking a walk in the woods.  A very long walk…  The “woods” here was the Appalachian Trail.  The “walk”, a multi-month 2,200 mile trek featuring mountains, blizzards, snakes, bears, tourist traps and the faint possibility of encountering a serial killer.  Lastly the hiker is a dumpy, middle-aged male with no athletic experience who should have known better.

The rest of the story is an amusingly-recounted plot of compromise, shortcuts, cheating and ultimate outright failure all set against stunning scenery.

The rallying cry is that he attempted it at all.

Most people would just watch the movie, have a quiet laugh and contemplate stealing a cheese slice from the refrigerator before bed.

Instead, taunted by this story of escape, I imagined just waking up one day, grabbing a few hundred dollars of stuff in a pack and setting off to walk to effectively the other end of a whole country!

“I could do that!  What’s to stop me?  How cool would that be?”

Oh wait.  I’m nearly nappy-dependant during the day and I wet the bed at night.  Really, I CAN’T do that.

And whose fault is that?  That would be mine. 

Once again, nappies get in the way of life.  Cue the guilt.

On the face of it, nappies shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a hike although describing doing the Appalachian Trail as a “hike” does not yield insight to the true scale of the venture.

Assuming that I could hold to my two-nappy-per-day diet, a week in the woods would only require a couple of packets of nappies.  Add to that at least a kilo of ancillary supplies.  And then there’s the question of dealing with the wet ones.  At up to 2 kilograms each and in adherence to the “leave nothing behind” policy, I could finish a week lugging nearly 30 kilos of cold wet nappies.

I’d need a Sherpa and I suspect Sherpa’s have had about enough of traipsing around after ageing middle-class westerners in an attempt to stop them from succumbing to their own inexperience in a wild environment in pursuit of some ineffably transformational mid-life-crisis borne experience.  Carting their wet nappies would just be next level.

That Sherpa would need to be carrying an awful lot of rash cream also.  There’d be biblical quantities of chafing with 30 kilometers of walking every day and the inability to wash at changes owing to the complete absence of just about everything one would need to do so would be another nail in the hygiene coffin.

I suppose nappies inside a sleeping bag are possible although the almost-inevitable leaking would have to be dealt with courtesy of the Sherpa also carrying a stock of terry-lined plastic pants or possibly a small washing machine and maybe a tumble dryer for the almost inevitable damp bits.

Perhaps it’s even possible that I could change myself inside that sleeping bag, that being the most likely opportunity to do so in privacy for vast amounts of the Appalachian trail.

I’d cut quite a sight though. There I would be, waddling awkwardly-clad in curiously-thick underwear, wincing from a pant-load of fungus and weeping thigh and waist elastic-pant sores, smelling distinctly of stale pee  being followed by an enraged Sherpa.

I supposed one upside of hiking this way might be that I’d seem less appetising to a bear.  Upon reflection though, I suspect most hikers transition to soiled underwear at some point during the “being eaten” experience so this might be nothing new for the average Grizzly.  The bear might even appreciate the intrigue of the additional unwrapping.

There was still a pang of painful regret I felt though.  I’m NOT about to walk the Appalachian trail (or indeed any of the possibly even more lethal hiking opportunities afforded to me by my own country’s flora, fauna and climatic malevolence towards humankind.

The trail is just a talisman for any significant life adventure. 

There are many, many things crazy, spontaneous things that I might consider doing: bicycling through Vietnam, waking to a hangover on a mate’s couch, water skiing in front of the kids, maybe even jumping out of a perfectly operational aircraft (perhaps even with a parachute).  None of these can be spontaneous and at their very best, are going to be awkward, difficult, expensive and potentially acutely embarrassing; all because I pursued a silly objective to an even sillier outcome.

We close more doors than we open when we do this to ourselves.  Something to think about.

[Little Sherri]

6 hours ago, oznl said:

I’m generally not keen on watching movies about books that I’ve already read.  They are so often disappointing to me (with notable exceptions such as Mario Puzo’s “Godfather” and the 2021 effort at Frank Herbert’s “Dune”).

I very much concur with this. Dune was great, so much more satisfying than earlier attempts (although, in their defense, it is challenging material for filmmakers to work with - people are willing to spend days reading novels, whereas a movie more than 180 minutes long will have very limited appeal...)

6 hours ago, oznl said:

If you haven’t read the book (and I recommend that you DO)

I haven't, and I will look it up.

If the trail were remote enough that you could expect nearly absolute privacy, I suppose you could hike in a cloth diaper only, down below, sans plastic pants, and you'd be dripping on the trail as you went. Jump in a lake or a river and give them a rinse, then hang them on top of your backpack to dry in the sun the next day, while you wear the other one you brought... as long as you don't encounter civilization much, it could work. Although I do see a confound in your wee potentially sluicing down your legs into your expensive hiking shoes. That would need to be worked out. 

I do plan to skydive someday and I will hopefully do it wearing a diaper, although I'm sure I'll obsess over which diaper would be the least embarrassing to have on, when I'm being scraped off the tarmac in the Walmart parking lot I reached terminal velocity over, after my chute fails to open.

 

[oznl]

A slightly odd thing happened the other day that may mean nothing but as nothing is a significant part of my life lately, I’ll report on it anyway.

I’d changed about an hour earlier: evening change.  I was in my comfy chair watching the news.  This is something I do to avoid any kind of sunny disposition.

Having dispensed with the nightly topics of the failures of capitalism, climate change and the existential societal threat posed by people who are not socialists, they were just starting the “racism in sport” segment (which seems to have replaced sport) and then hopefully the weather which is probably the only useful thing I get out of the news these days.  Such is “news” from a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.

I stood up to start dinner and realised as I did so that my nappy felt slightly wet.  This proved to be because it was.

That’s not unusual except for the fact I’d changed into it not one hour ago and had not the slightest inkling when this might have happened.  I had no recollection of using it at all.

In all probability, I’d probably did it deliberately, having become aware at some level that some small amount of pee had accumulated in my tank but I’d failed to truly mentally process this decision and so instantly forgot about it.

There’s been incidents before where I’ve been slightly surprised to realise that I was wetting myself without quite recalling deciding to do so.  This incident was a little different insofar as I evidently completely finished a pee without noticing and only realised it had happened some indefinite time later.

Not incontinent I suspect but rather very, very careless…  I'm aware that many others have experienced this very early on in their 24/7 journeys but it seems I'm a slow learner.

[Little Sherri]

On 6/10/2023 at 3:14 AM, oznl said:

Not incontinent I suspect but rather very, very careless…  I'm aware that many others have experienced this very early on in their 24/7 journeys but it seems I'm a slow learner.

I've had this happen as well. I don't chalk it up to burgeoning incontinence, but rather, early onset dementia... I think I just forget doing it sometimes, because it's become so automatic. 

One concurrent experience I've had, is this: permissioning a transfer, and then noticing some time later that stuff is still moving around down there, without any sensation that I'm actively doing anything. It's somewhat disconcerting. Having thrown the gates open, it's like they didn't get closed again once the main event had been completed, and then some further trickling continues, or starts up again. This happened to me the other day while I was drinking with some buddies - I actually put a hand on the front of my diaper, under the table - I could feel a vibration in "the area", fluidic turbulence, essentially, but I wasn't consciously expelling anything. I can stop it at will (which is different from a more forceful stream, which I now cannot stop at will, once it has commenced), although when I notice it, I try not to - it's almost like seeing deer in the woods. I go all still and pay rapt attention while trying not to change any "settings" down there, which only works for a moment. Trying not to think about something you're thinking about is a fool's game. 

[oznl]

This week my beloved have been perfecting the art of living as empty nesters.

We’ve had the first discussion delineating between “companionship” and “dependency” already after I was issued what was virtually a beloved-centric running schedule for an entire weekend.  To be fair, she has since tried to reduce her efforts to fill all my spare time organising and delivering activities for her.  I have even since been again allowed to occasionally use my study largely undisturbed

A more annoying aspect of empty-nest life is that my beloved’s smartphone has come to join us as an overnight guest in our boudoir.

I have a thing about electronic devices in the bedroom:  just no.

Apparently it’s there in case the last of our departed progeny should need her advice on some aspect independent adulthood at 2am: such as, how to close a door, operate a toaster, or perhaps be reminded of how food appears in a refrigerator in the absence of on-site parents. 

The problem I have with infernal device (and this coming from a terminal nerd) is even when it doesn’t make the dreaded “kids are texting” noise, it buzzes and rattles all night on her bedside table with a never-ending series of unimportant updates on global weather, dubiously-relevant sales events or the latest social media irrelevancy from one of her implausibly large cohort of Facebook “friends”.

ALL the notifications are turned on.

She sleeps through all of these of course.  Only the correct “children texting” tone will penetrate her sleep-firewall but I, as a terrible sleeper, am almost invariably woken by each of these Android farts.

I’m well aware I can configure the damned thing not buzz all night but it’s her phone and she’s made it very clear that she doesn’t want me “fiddling with it”.

My entreaties to remove it until morning have also fallen on deaf ears, discarded as unworthy distractions from her nobler goal of perpetual urban mother self-sacrifice.

I also think the constant nocturnal interruptions have stopped my bedwetting.

It seems quite difficult to pee in your sleep when every 30 minutes you are NOT asleep because a smart phone 4 feet from your head thinks you should know something.  Instead I’m constantly and at least semi-consciously voiding through the night after being woken by these endless disruptions (in breaking news however, I suspect I “wet the bed” last night after first drinking vat of red wine but for many obvious reasons, this is not a sustainable bedwetting strategy).

On the upside, much of the imperative with respect to camouflage and pick up after myself around the house as it applies to my nappies seems to have evaporated.

I’ve had cloth nappies air-drying in one of our (many) spare rooms for days.  On some other cloth nappy days (weekend) I’ve gone even further and decided to delay changing until after breakfast.  The upside for my beloved is that breakfast appears faster (I do most of the cooking) but the downside is that she must endure me marinating in a wet cloth night nappy next to her that I suspect, in the fashion of cloth night nappies, has a faint toddler signature-scent regardless of plastic pant countermeasures.

Nothing has been said.

Last Sunday, after almost-reluctantly changing out of an extremely comfortable (but definitely soaked) overnight pinned terry nappy, I considered landfill, cash-flow and the planet and said “screw it”, changing instead into another cloth for the day forcing my beloved to contemplate my even-puffier-than-usual midriff until dinner time.

Nothing was said.

The cloth day-nappy in question was a new one for me: a Rearz “pre-fold” that had, in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions, been somewhat-redundantly washed and dried multiple times before first seeing action.

Whilst comfortable, my opinion on pre-folds hasn’t changed.  They are either tragically saggy or I’m doing it wrong (yes, it could WELL be the latter and all advice is welcomed).  Generous sizing length-wise meant that I had to fold them over at one end to ensure they didn’t pin up at my chest, this had somewhat contributed to the balloon-like proportions to the front of my jeans beneath them but despite using “snappi” elastic nappy clips AND a compression pant over the lot, once they had a bit of moisture on-board, I found myself all-too-often inelegantly trying to haul them back up again at my hips as they repeatedly wandered off to say hello to my knees.

Nothing was said.

Their fit is just far too loose.  Maybe I’m just the wrong shape.  Tragically, the terrain between my belly and crotch is a ski slope, not a plain.

It’s a shame because they are comfortable and didn’t leak all day (even though for some reason, I’d decided that they WERE leaking at the rear leg elastics at some point, upon examination this turned out to be fiction).

We’re hosting a dinner party this weekend though so I will have to remember to pick up after myself properly lest our guests be given additional conversational topics to share with each other on their drives home.

[zzyzx]

14 hours ago, oznl said:

Whilst comfortable, my opinion on pre-folds hasn’t changed.  They are either tragically saggy or I’m doing it wrong (yes, it could WELL be the latter and all advice is welcomed).  Generous sizing length-wise meant that I had to fold them over at one end to ensure they didn’t pin up at my chest, this had somewhat contributed to the balloon-like proportions to the front of my jeans beneath them but despite using “snappi” elastic nappy clips AND a compression pant over the lot, once they had a bit of moisture on-board, I found myself all-too-often inelegantly trying to haul them back up again at my hips as they repeatedly wandered off to say hello to my knees.

Nothing was said.

Their fit is just far too loose.  Maybe I’m just the wrong shape.  Tragically, the terrain between my belly and crotch is a ski slope, not a plain.

@oznlSounds like you some times need a mid-day (between change) "snappi" (or diaper pin) adjustment to tighten things up.  Cloth will stretch over time necessitating re-pinning to tighten things up.

[oznl]

9 hours ago, zzyzx said:

@oznlSounds like you some times need a mid-day (between change) "snappi" (or diaper pin) adjustment to tighten things up.  Cloth will stretch over time necessitating re-pinning to tighten things up.

I think that might be a thing here although the challenge I've faced is that my "snappi" don't seem to be able to "grab" the surface of those relatively-smooth Rearz prefolds.  They do certainly start out ok but within a few hours, they've wandered off to check out my knees.

[zzyzx]

13 hours ago, oznl said:

I think that might be a thing here although the challenge I've faced is that my "snappi" don't seem to be able to "grab" the surface of those relatively-smooth Rearz prefolds.  They do certainly start out ok but within a few hours, they've wandered off to check out my knees.

I've tried both the snappi and boingo as a substitute for regular (diaper) pins.  I was considering them as a non-metallic substitute that might be better when having to go through metal detectors.  With (US) TSA now going primarily with full (nude) body scanners at airports for those who don't pay the fee to get a secure travel number, there isn't much point to it.  I found both of these two substitutes when you get them set to properly grip tend to tear the looser weave used in my preferred cloth diapers.  So, I normally don't use these options and instead regularly use regular (baby) diaper pins (total of four - two per side).  I suspect if I had the right cloth diaper weave either of these might be a good substitute. 

Wearing Jeans over the diapers, if I set off the metal detector any beep from the secondary (hand held screening) is typically blamed on the metal rivets in the Jeans instead of the diaper pins just below the rivets.

[ozziebee]

Snappi’s need to be under tension, for the claws to dig into the material.  You can use a snappi like a boingo by having the two long arms together, leaving the short (middle) arm on the other end. 

The snappi does work if you can have one of the long arms attach to one wing of the nappy, the other long arm attached to the other wing of the nappy, and then pull down the middle arm down the centreline towards the crotch. This will pull the wings together and down at the same time. Add a second snappi in the same layout but about two cm lower, and things will be nice and tight/snug. 

I use the net fixing pants right over the top, which stops the snappies undoing and moving around. 

Ill also use pins to backup the snappies. 

[oznl]

A dinner party this week, dealt with quietly and competently using a “Critter Caboose”: on after a 4pm shower, it remained faithfully on duty until 9am the next day with zero leakage and unfailing comfort.

Fortunately, the dinner party involved my old mate (we’ll call him “Bud”) but less fortunately, it also involved his third wife of whom I’ve spoken before.  To avoid repetitious invective, I shall quote myself from a December 2021 blog entry describing her:

“Version 3.0 of the love of Bud’s life emerged very recently.  Short, squat (still, I look at her and think of R2D2) garrulous, none-too-bright with just a dash of vindictiveness, whatever her redeeming features may be they remain enigmatic from the confines of social engagement.  Of her wit and conversational prowess, she remains staunchly her greatest fan.

We’ll call her “SFB” on account of my estimated composition of her brains.”

SFB was in full form that evening, dominating and controlling discourse at the table in her relentless drive to ensure that discussion remained within her incredibly narrow field of interest and even narrower ability to comprehend.

Not even the Spotify playlist going in the background escaped her micromanagement.

“I don’t like American bands” she interjected into a conversation we’d started about an upcoming national Government referendum:   Talking Heads' track “Once in a Lifetime” had started.

“Technically David Byrne is Scottish” I replied.

“Nah, he’s American.  I don’t like American bands”

She’d just finished noisily singing her way through Violent Femmes “Blister In The Sun”.  Presumably she thought they were French, like Quebec.

“What about Fleetwood Mac?” enquired my beloved in a silky voice.

“Oh THEY’RE not American!” she replied in a lightly-peppered-didactic tone.  Nope, you have to get up early in the morning to outwit SFB.

Having yet again wrested the conversational steering wheel back to herself, we went from discussing post-colonial reconciliation to her latest litany of minor health dramas.

It seems her latest complaint concerned nocturia: a condition that involves needing to urinate more than twice per night.  Few people would consider the discussion of nocturia to be a suitable one the dinner table but SFB is one of few people.

Soon we got to the “audience participation” phase of her discourse.  After embarrassing “Bud” by over-sharing that he’d long since sailed past the ability to sleep from one end of the night to the other without getting up at least once for a pee she turned her attention to my beloved:

“And what about you?  Do you have to get up during the night?”

“Uh, yeah, sometimes, once, on a bad night maybe twice”.

She was understating things.  It’s more like twice on ANY night now but the social crime here was that of the interrogator administering the verbal beating, not the terrified villager tied to a chair in front of them.

And now it was my turn.

“And what about YOU?  Do YOU have to get up during the night now?”

“Nope” I replied instantly.

Stunned silence.

“Really, not at ALL?”

“Nope, I just don’t…”

I felt my beloved stiffen beside me.   She wore compressed face of worry unconvincingly presented as studied neutrality as she gazed out the window into the darkness.

A second or three of silence grinded by at glacial pace but I offered nothing further.

“Well!  YOU’RE just WEIRD!” pronounced SFB.

Yanking the conversational steering wheel back yet again, we lurched onwards to listen about typewriters, polar bears and the disagreeable nature of food from any ethnic group other than her own.  I was barely listening as I poured Bud another vat of red wine as well as one for myself.  We’d already drunk intensively alone out on the back deck where I was running the BBQ but this kind of social discourse required frequent alcoholic top-ups for us to withstand in silence.

Nevertheless though, she WAS right:  I WAS weird.  She just didn’t know just how or why.

[oznl]

The winter solstice happened very early this morning.   I slept through it (12:57am local time) but it was still disappointingly cold and dark when the alarm went off at 6am.

No matter.  We’ve only got another 6 weeks or so of “cold” weather before I can start complaining about the heat but since the forecast for tomorrow is 27C, I may not even have that.

At work, I’ve been dampening my jeans daily as I work my way through a case of distinctly “old” size Rearz InControl Hybrid Elite (Barry) that fell through a whole in the diaper time/space continuum, sending me temporarily back to 2022.

Back in 2022, I can dimly recall complaining about the minor, but nearly inevitable end-of-day leaks at my right rear thigh with Barry.  These certainly became less prevalent when Barry sizing went to the “new” formula but did not entirely disappear.

It occurred to me the other day that there may well be a degree of seasonality in all this.  I can distinctly remember this time a year ago, wrestling with almost-daily issues with very minor pants-wetting which seemed to slowly get better until Barry changed their cut whereupon those mini-leaks practically disappeared.

I’m wondering if the cold weather has something to do with things.  It could simply be that I’m sweating less and therefore peeing more.

In any case, I decided to try to manage the situation by adding a cloth “layer” over my disposable before my plastic pants.  This certainly is NOT something I’d want to be doing in the warmer months (and MOST months of the year are “warmer” ones here).

The batter-up for this role was some pull-on style Kins “flannel” nappy pants.  Desperately thin, you’d need at least 10 “layers” of these to have any real hope of actual using in full peeing situations I can’t exactly remember why I bought them.  They probably just looked a lot bulkier in the marketing-cooked product-shot.  Still, they were thin enough not to give me that “Tele-tubby” profile of full cloth nappies.

They certainly didn’t stop the leaks but they DID however provide forensic evidence as to where these leaks were originating.

I’d always blamed my right rear thigh because that’s inevitably where the damp patch on my jeans appeared but the flannel pull-on pants told a different story.

In fact, the leak was occurring  at the top of my inner crotch/base of the pubic area.  It seems like pee runs across me sometimes there and escapes out into my plastic pants.  This kind of leak seems to occur mainly when I’ve wet whilst seated (which is pretty common these days).  Having reached the plastic pants, pee then follows gravity and makes it out into my jeans NOT where it first escaped my nappy but rather at the lowest point inside my plastic pants.  The leak is at the lower FRONT of my nappy, not the rear.  It’s still on the right hand side but it’s NOT a press-out leak happening at my bum.  This is about fit, not padding.

The location/misdirection thing is like the leaks you spot from a metal house roof.  The location of the damp patch on the plaster ceiling tells one nothing about the the location of water ingression above because rainwater, like pee, commutes.

The flannel nappy pants are NOT a great solution.  I end up having to not only toss a disposable but deal with a pee-sodden cloth garment as well and the additional insulation will be deeply unloved by August, or possibly even tomorrow.

I’m a bit tired of the leaks to be honest.  At this point I can only hope that warmer weather, “new” size cut Barrys, or some combination of the two will bring me back into the dry zone at the end of the day…

[Little Sherri]

On 6/15/2023 at 8:21 AM, oznl said:

A more annoying aspect of empty-nest life is that my beloved’s smartphone has come to join us as an overnight guest in our boudoir.

I have a thing about electronic devices in the bedroom:  just no.

Apparently it’s there in case the last of our departed progeny should need her advice on some aspect independent adulthood at 2am: such as, how to close a door, operate a toaster, or perhaps be reminded of how food appears in a refrigerator in the absence of on-site parents. 

I've faced almost exactly this situation since our eldest went away to school. However, my beloved is a bit more open to my suggestions about putting on "do not disturb" and then granting override privileges to a select few. However, in an inversion of your situation, she often has trouble falling asleep, even after taking enough melatonin to stun an ox, whereas I do not, so she will watch a show on her phone while wearing wireless headphones the size of twin throw pillows, and while she's doing that, she'll sometimes also text and use social media... how she sees that much on her tiny screen, I do not know... and she sometimes leaves that tic-tic-tic keyboard sound on. I guess it doesn't present within the headphones? Or, she likes it!?! Which frequently causes me to have to tap her on the shoulder and ask her to silence the 1975 Underwood typewriter soundtrack that is filling the room, although I cannot hear the dialogue of "The Queen Usurper" streaming service period piece junk historical inaccuracy she's invariably following.  

Once in a past life I was on call on nights and weekends as a troubleshooter for environmental services mishaps in most of the hospitals around our city - they'd call me before calling a contractor, to avoid spending money where possible, or, to avoid getting hosed if they had to hire someone - and to this day, I keep my phone on silent 90% of the time, because I still have PTSD from that era. So I was able to play a "this is NOT negotiable" card with my wife over the sounds her phone is permitted to make in the silent darkness. The goddamn puppy is another story. 

[oznl]

The most recent bedwetting drought unambiguously concluded in the usual fashion the other night.

It wasn’t a night I was specifically testing for bedwetting, having established that the test itself triggers the Heisenberg uncertainty principle whereby an intentional attempt at observation observation alters the observable outcome.  It was just that I fell asleep in a dry nappy, a consequence of a cloth nappy night after a cloth nappy day coupled with suspicions that my “evening shift” Rearz Omutsu could not be trusted for a night shift.  Accordingly, last thing before bed I changed myself into pull-on Babykins cotton/terry nappies under plastic pants, chugged a glass of water to ward off the effects of all that red wine and went to bed: dry.

I stirred at 2am.  I’m not sure if it was my beloved’s phone or just because that’s what I do.

I didn’t feel wet and based on the previous weeks’ experience, I expected to find myself dry but I checked anyway.

Nope.  It seems I had wet myself.

No pee dreams, no hazy memories, just a wet nappy.  On top of the previous morning’s surprisingly-wet garment, it yielded further evidence suggesting that bedwetting is very definitely back (if indeed it ever left).

It hadn’t been a major accident, perfectly comfortable and so I swiftly fell back asleep, subsequently disturbed only by my beloved’s trips to the toilet at each of which I sniggered inwardly.  She used to be able to last right through the night.  Not anymore.  But then again, neither do I.  We just have different coping strategies.  It probably didn’t help our cause that it was 7C (I realise that is a pathetic excuse for “overnight winter cold” but it’s very cold by OUR standards and we live in a house with louvered windows and ceiling fans).

It was all delightfully soporific until 6am at which time a pair of brush turkeys (Alectura Lathami if you feel so inclined to google) decided that the metal roof above our bedroom was a great spot for some protracted, hot, noisy turkey lurve…  Keeping themselves warm I suppose.  I think turkeys should be kept warm in ovens.

Thus our morning lie-in concluded.

My beloved had an errand to run first thing and in my new, empty-nest world, there was no pressing need for me to change immediately, I was warm, comfortable and quite-dry-on-the-outside.  I decided to marinate a little longer in my night nappy and have some breakfast, delaying my morning change until after she had left.

Upon her departure, I started receiving signals from downstairs that a #2 might be in order.  In my new normal, I cannot ignore these messages for any length of time and in any case, as warm and as comfy as I was, it was time for a nappy change.  Leakage was just around the corner.

Having toddled upstairs, I’d made it all the way down the hall to our ensuite bathroom whereupon a kind of “latch key incontinence” kicked in.  Suddenly my degree #2 urgency went from “7” to “10” and it became obvious that the delta between a successful use of the toilet and an unplanned full nappy was at best, a few more seconds.  There was no time to lose.  I didn’t have time to fully remove my nappy, I just slid the whole affair down my legs before sinking backwards gratefully onto the throne.

Mission accomplished:  Sweet relief was mingled with the reassurance that my night nappies were merely wet and thus could be rinsed and laundered without marital censure.   I just needed to stand up, kick them off from their current location (shackling my ankles together in a bathroom filled with unforgiving hard ceramic edges) and head for the shower.

I rose from the toilet and immediately heard a spattering noise at the floor.

A plumbing catastrophe?

No.  I found myself to be peeing on the floor!  What the actual??

I tried to stop. 

That trick hasn’t worked for years.

As quick as I could, I hauled my wet nappy back up my legs (disappointingly, it had cooled remarkably in that short time away and wasn’t quite as comfortable) and back close enough to my crotch whereby it could catch the anaemic dribble and allow me to hobble to the shower recess where spillage wouldn’t matter.

Once things had stopped standing in the shower, I used a dryish patch at the back of my then-completely-removed nappy to mop up the small pee puddles on the tiles.

I could have sworn my bladder was empty when I’d sat down but it seems that the matter of primary urgency having been dealt with, some kind of anatomical obstructive pressure was relieved and a bit more drainage ensued.

Not incontinent but not always quite continent either: my new normal.

[oznl]

I’ve read accounts of stab victims describing their initial sensation as being that of a kind of “thump” and a dull ache, strangely incommensurate with the magnitude of the event that has befallen them.

It is such as this when nappies attack.

My predilection for “old school” nappies (when I can get away with them: they’re not subtle) comes with many practical compromises.  Apart from having the visual discretion of King Kong in a 7-11 and the kind of bulk that can make standing up and sitting down an aspirational goal, there’s the question of pins.

3” all-steel nappy pins are getting hard to find.  The freely-available, low-cost plastic-duckie-headed pins are, in addition to making already-embarrassing underwear choices worse, desperately fragile.  Snappis, whilst having their place, bother me a little with their “all” or “nothing” support modalities.

So I persist with my ancient steel pins.

Pinning a kite-folded 60” x 60” terry on a well-more-than-6-foot grownup with the physical form factor of a phone booth is tough enough before we factor in the less-than-gliding surface afforded by thick and slightly-corroded pins.

Added to this is the annoying habit that cloth nappies have of sagging after they’ve gotten a bit wet.

Ideally, cloth nappies should be re-pinned after they become a bit wet to take up the slack.

Whoever posed that idea however failed to realise that whilst driving my housing-nail-sized “safety” pins through DRY nappies was merely very difficult, getting them through pee-wet-and-expanded terry towelling was realistically impossible.

I solve this dilemma by pinning up my nappies very, very tightly. 

I try to balance the discomfort of having my visceral organs extruded up into my rib cage with the comforting knowledge that soon enough, the nappy will be a bit wetter and therefore looser.

Of course, driving those aforementioned slightly corroded pins through 3 to 4 layers of terry towelling pulled so taut it could possibly be played as a string instrument requires some strength and possibly a nail gun.  More than one of my pins has succumbed to Titan-style implosion under immense application pressure.

A more common complication however is the head of the pin getting stuck somewhere deep within the nappy folds with nearly no amount of force sufficient to drive it all the way through where it can be attached to its clasp.

Coating the pin with moisturiser or soap before attempting insertion does help but it isn’t always easy.

There I was, trying to drive in the “anchor” pin that holds the two wings of the folded nappy  together at my crotch through more than half an inch of taut, folded terry towelling the consistency of fibre cement.  The pin was stuck, roughly 4/5 of the way through.  I contorted and worked my fingers around, feeling for where the head was stuck with one hand whilst applying all the force that I could muster with another.

Suddenly, the pin moved and I was rewarded with an instant, deep, dull ache blossoming from the tip of my finger.

Glancing at the mirror in front of me, I saw an ominous crimson spot appearing on the front of my  nappy from where that very same fingertip rested.

Removing said finger to survey the damage, blood immediately started to drip onto the floor.  This wasn’t your average pin-prick.

Grabbing tissues, I wrapped them around my finger tip whereupon they immediately turned red.

As tissue #3 gradually became blood soaked, trying to favour my other fingers I attempted to complete pinning pm my nappy lest it slide to the floor.  Pin heads now slippery with blood, a further series of bloody finger prints were thusly transferred to the front of my formerly-white nappy.

Hauling up plastic pants resulted in yet more blood drips but with my nappy now at least secured, I stuck my finger in my mouth and sucked, the strangely iron-based taste of blood suffusing my tongue.  Closer examination of the wounded appendage showed a rather neat incision rather than a simple pin prick of around 3mm in length and I suspect, of similar depth.  I realise that it wouldn’t rate highly on a WW1 battlefield but what it lacked in visceral gore it made up for with enthusiastic exsanguination.

Another tissue or two later, the bleeding seemed to have slowed and I turned my attention towards the various blood drips and spatters around our bathroom in my own personal “Shower scene from Psycho”.

It was at this point that I heard my beloved at our ensuite door:

“Are you alright in there?”

“Yes! I’m fine!”, I retorted in a tone of voice that brooked no further discourse.

I suppose she’s unused to me spending any significant amount of time in a toilet these days.

Having cleaned up the bathroom floor and sink as best as I could, I pulled on some tracksuit pants over my nappy and plastic pants (which were translucent enough to suggest bloodstains below) and bandaged my finger as best as I could and, with as much dignity as I could muster, returned to the living room.

“What did you do to your finger?” she asked immediately.

“Oh, I found something unexpectedly sharp in my drawer” I replied somewhat evasively.  The pin DID come from my bedside drawer.  That’s where I keep my nappy pins.

Nothing more was said and together we watched Netflix as the bandage on my finger slowly darkened.

The next day it became clear that the punishment of the pin did not end with a simple deep piercing.  Not satisfied at merely attempting to penetrate my heart all the way from the tip of my forefinger, it seemed that the attacking nappy pin also carried a weapons-grade biological payload, delivering bacteria from nappies past directly into the flesh of my finger.

My wounded finger was now hot, swollen and red (like a bad porn film) with a gently weeping wound.

But I am a man and emergency rooms are for wimps.

I sprayed it with isopropyl circuit cleaner (because that's what I had to hand, no pun intended) and trying not to scream, reinforced a band-aid with masking tape before embarking upon a therapy regime of ignoring it until it got better.

I suppose sepsis would have been the other option but clearly I’m still typing…

[Little Sherri]

I've done this before. Probably not to the extent that you did on this occasion, but, it is amazing how much a pricked finger will bleed, relative to the dimensions of the wound. I'm not that great at putting cloth diapers on myself - I get aches in my neck and fingers and wrist while trying to plant the pins - I will try that moisturizer or soap suggestion. 

[tuffy]

For the pins, you might try some fine grit emery cloth or steel wool to smooth out the corroded spots and perhaps sharpen the tip.

For the battle damage, soak the finger in a warm salt water solution until the skin wrinkles once a day or so. If the redness doesn't go away in a few days, seek medical attention.

[zzyzx]

7 hours ago, tuffy said:

For the pins, you might try some fine grit emery cloth or steel wool to smooth out the corroded spots and perhaps sharpen the tip.

@oznl I second finding something to sharpen the tips with.  It will help.

However, this is part of the reason why I use regular diaper pins and not the thicker 3" steel pins.  Yes, the 3" steel pins are better overall in design for what is needed, but they are trouble getting them through the cloth. 

13 hours ago, oznl said:

3” all-steel nappy pins are getting hard to find.  The freely-available, low-cost plastic-duckie-headed pins are, in addition to making already-embarrassing underwear choices worse, desperately fragile.  Snappis, whilst having their place, bother me a little with their “all” or “nothing” support modalities.

So I persist with my ancient steel pins.

...

Whoever posed that idea however failed to realise that whilst driving my housing-nail-sized “safety” pins through DRY nappies was merely very difficult, getting them through pee-wet-and-expanded terry towelling was realistically impossible.

...

More than one of my pins has succumbed to Titan-style implosion under immense application pressure.

A more common complication however is the head of the pin getting stuck somewhere deep within the nappy folds with nearly no amount of force sufficient to drive it all the way through where it can be attached to its clasp.

Coating the pin with moisturiser or soap before attempting insertion does help but it isn’t always easy.

I agree that I now have a harder time finding "good" regular diaper pins as the Chinese made ones are not of as good a quality metal as the older pins a lot of the time....  Haven't looked for the 3" ones that used to be for blankets or possibly kilts.  The ones that I manage to find of better quality do work better than the 3" steel one you prefer, but I believe I have to use two for each one of your 3" pins to accomplish the same thing.  But the finger stabs won't be as sever. 

I do recommend that you do a cold wash of that nappy prior to running a hot wash on that one or you might find some permanent red / pinkish staining.

Best wishes on quickly healing....

[ozziebee]

Buying genuine 2" nappy safety pins is far superior to the ones we get from an ABDL supplier, at cheaper cost, and more of them in a pack.  I've bought Pidgeon brand (so not chiniese made, but Germany) nappy pins from a baby supply store, and they've taken a beating without destroying themselves, with no discolouration or corrosion.  These have a hard plastic safety cover.  Only issue is they are _sharp_, which means the sharp tip can bend causing a microscopic hook over time.

I also use a newspaper fold for my prefolds, not a kite fold.  This means less overlap (its basically one fold over onto itself), and then I don't pin through the fold, just the outer layers of fabric.

I keep harping on about snappies, and these work.  I use 8 of them at each nappy change.  They're stretched, but not extremely to the point of breaking. 8 of them working together means they all take the strain, so less chance to break.  I found the snappies from BigW or a baby supply store work equally well.  I'd love to find the Toddler sized ones, but these are rare in AUS.  

[zzyzx]

15 hours ago, ozziebee said:

Buying genuine 2" nappy safety pins is far superior to the ones we get from an ABDL supplier, at cheaper cost, and more of them in a pack.  I've bought Pidgeon brand (so not chiniese made, but Germany) nappy pins from a baby supply store, and they've taken a beating without destroying themselves, with no discolouration or corrosion.  These have a hard plastic safety cover.  Only issue is they are _sharp_, which means the sharp tip can bend causing a microscopic hook over time.

@ozziebee

Interesting.  I'm hard pressed to find decent 2" diaper pins in the US.  I "assume" most of what I see is from China, and it is a wild card how soft the metal will be.  Once I find a color that seems to be "reasonable" I order quantity.  However I'm not seeing the old brands available (at least at a reasonable price).  Haven't heard of Pidgeon in the US.....  Hmmm....

[oznl]

On 7/7/2023 at 4:40 AM, tuffy said:

For the pins, you might try some fine grit emery cloth or steel wool to smooth out the corroded spots and perhaps sharpen the tip.

For the battle damage, soak the finger in a warm salt water solution until the skin wrinkles once a day or so. If the redness doesn't go away in a few days, seek medical attention.

I used 800 grit "wet and dry" which certainly smoothed them out a bit but the metal remains pitted.  I also suspect I took off most of what passed for a nickel coating, not that there was much nickel.  Because of this, they may corrode even faster but the initial insertion (I wore pinned terries again last night) after I took off the surface rust was although not effortless, notably easier.

The finger is on the mend.  I'm not sure if spraying it with isopropyl spray did anything more than provide some punishment for my stupidity.

5 hours ago, zzyzx said:

@ozziebee

Interesting.  I'm hard pressed to find decent 2" diaper pins in the US.  I "assume" most of what I see is from China, and it is a wild card how soft the metal will be.

Yeah that...  The 2" Chinese Cheapies for me will often as not, implode under insertion pressure.  They seem to be made of a plasticine that looks like steel...

23 hours ago, zzyzx said:

I do recommend that you do a cold wash of that nappy prior to running a hot wash on that one or you might find some permanent red / pinkish staining.

For the record of science, it seems that just peeing in it overnight was enough to disperse the stains and prevent them from setting.  At my morning change, there was little sign of the previous night's carnage!

21 hours ago, ozziebee said:

Buying genuine 2" nappy safety pins is far superior to the ones we get from an ABDL supplier, at cheaper cost, and more of them in a pack.  I've bought Pidgeon brand (so not chiniese made, but Germany) nappy pins from a baby supply store, and they've taken a beating without destroying themselves, with no discolouration or corrosion.  These have a hard plastic safety cover.  Only issue is they are _sharp_, which means the sharp tip can bend causing a microscopic hook over time.

I also use a newspaper fold for my prefolds, not a kite fold.  This means less overlap (its basically one fold over onto itself), and then I don't pin through the fold, just the outer layers of fabric.

I keep harping on about snappies, and these work.  I use 8 of them at each nappy change.  They're stretched, but not extremely to the point of breaking. 8 of them working together means they all take the strain, so less chance to break.  I found the snappies from BigW or a baby supply store work equally well.  I'd love to find the Toddler sized ones, but these are rare in AUS.  

I've googled "newspaper fold" and I guess I could give that a go but in fact for my anatomy, that overlap kind of works in my favour.

I've got Big W "snappies" but I'm struggling to see how I could deploy 8 of them on a single nappy!

The Pidgeon pins might be worth looking for.  The ABDL pins sold down here are just complete rubbish I'm afraid.  The last few Littles Downunder just gave to me for nothing because the proprietor himself had little faith in them.  Within  a couple of use cycles, the plastic pin clasps went brittle and cracked.

On 7/6/2023 at 11:06 PM, Little Sherri said:

I'm not that great at putting cloth diapers on myself - I get aches in my neck and fingers and wrist while trying to plant the pins - I will try that moisturizer or soap suggestion. 

Yep.  This is a thing.  Coating the pins with skin moisturiser certainly helps for me.  My beloved had a lanolin based one for a while that was actually quite awesome for the job (I've since discovered that old-fashioned sheep grease is actually a truly remarkable lubricant).  I wish I'd paid attention to the brand.

 

 

[oznl]

Roused by the 6am bad-news-bulletin on the clock radio on Monday morning, I greeted the dawn from a pair of thoroughly-wet terry-lined plastic pants.  They felt fine when I woke but a quick thumb check under the elastic yielded marsh-like sogginess at the cloth layer.

It seems I’d cashed in my night nappy insurance policy during the wee hours.

Annoyingly, it was a Rearz “Critter Caboose” that had failed to contain my night’s work.  I’d donned this super-nappy at around 4pm the previous Sunday as an afternoon drinks session with friends was likely to segue into dinner and I didn’t want the hassle of a nappy change at 8pm on Sunday night.

A caboose in my experience can effortlessly handle a 14 hour shift but not it seems this one.

Courtesy of Madam Alcohol, it’s almost certain that a few of the 3 – 5 pee episodes I routinely experience overnight happened whilst I was asleep:  I could dimly remember ONE of them but the others were a bit of a mystery.

Whilst bed-wetting does raise the odds of nocturnal leakage as I am less “reliably” positioned, I haven’t actually had to deal with disposable leakage for some weeks.

Removing the Caboose, a quick weigh-in showed its gross weight to be just shy of 2kg meaning that it had absorbed something in the order of 1750ml of pee since the previous afternoon.  This is a lot but well within the Caboose’s normal safe operating envelope which in my experience, runs to about 2 litres.

Forensic examination of the failed Caboose told the tale.

It certainly was NOT overloaded.  Instead, the plastic covering had developed two vertical tears (splits) about 40mm in length and perhaps 20mm apart on the inside of the lower left tape.  It seemed that the expanding force of soaked polymer crystals in conjunction with the aggressive/firm tape setting I’d applied the nappy with (I HATE sagging nappies) had caused stress fractures in the outer liner.  As these splits occurred pretty much close to “ground zero” for pee action, pee had coursed through these breaches freely to drench my terry safety-layer.

I’m just about out of my “muscle-nappy” supply with only 4 left.  I tend to only buy these one pack at a time as they are expensive and I only use them occasionally (in those rare circumstances where I know I’m likely to need to go 14 hours or more between changing).

I’m thinking however that I’ll replace them with the “Mermaid Tales” rather than more “Caboose”.  Although both have equally-lurid décor, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat and  I suspect the reversibility of the hook-and-loop taping system of the Mermaids makes me less aggressive in originally taping them up.  I know I can subsequently cinch them back up if I need to: an option not available with the Caboose as the tape/landing zone combination sticks so firmly that, like a bee stinging its victim, the process of disengaging afterwards results in fatal evisceration.

I once again silently thanked the miraculous safety-net that those thick, terry-lined Babykins waterproof pants provide.  I don’t know how many episodes of marital embarrassment and laundry they have saved me.  I really don’t understand how adult-sized bedwetters could realistically live without them.