Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Little Sherri]

15 hours ago, oznl said:

The sensation of wetting it reminded me of the fake towel diapers I'd make as a kid

This is an excerpt directly from my childhood as well. It's interesting how frequently something like this features in the biographies of people in this arena. 

I grew up in disposables most of the time, although I have a recollection of wearing cloth diapers, and for a long time, including my first couple of years here, I believed that I wore them a significant portion of the time - let's say a third or half of the time I spent in diapers. But a chat with my mom a few years back disabused me of that notion - she said that she didn't like cloth diapers and only put me in them if she was out of disposables - apparently the largest size was sometimes harder to find, and they got them at a discount because my dad worked for a company that distributed them to department stores, so if it came to paying full pop for a case of diapers, or going cloth for a few days, cloth won out. But it is representative of the impact cloth diapers had on my psyche, that in the disjointed cinematic universe of my early memories, they featured disproportionately. I'm still weird about wearing cloth diapers in front of my wife, whereas I'm not shy about being in a disposable at all. 

After I outgrew wearing diapers for "legitimate" reasons, and my parents stopped buying them for me, I realized that I still wanted them very badly, but obviously, I couldn't put diapers on my Christmas list, so I took to making my own out of towels and pillow cases, and handcrafting plastic pants out of white shopping bags or garbage bags.

[oznl]

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

This is an excerpt directly from my childhood as well.

It was actually @superabsorbantpolymer who made that quote but it might as well have been me since as a child, I did exactly the same thing.  Another data point in favour of your hypothesis.

As a kid, I'd rescued a couple of ancient towels from the route to the rag bag, appropriated some of the abundant supplies of nappy pins that were scattered around the house (all my siblings were younger and in contrast to myself, were bedwetters until at least 6 or 7 years of age) and for plastic pants, there were shopping bags.

Back in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, the rise of supermarkets (and the associated downfall of the corner grocery store) had seen paper bags replaced with good old fossil-fuel-derived, single-use plastic bags.  We weren't talking the ultra-thin Chinese plastic bags that would split if you looked at them too long either.  These were old school, thick, crinkly white plastic and when you were done with them, you could stuff them down a sea turtle's neck or choke a seagull.  It seemed discarded plastic bags always went to the beach.  Such were the environmental mores of the day.

By making holes in the two bottom corners of the bag that were smaller than the diameter of one's thighs, the bag could be hauled up over one's legs like plastic pants.  Each of these corner holes could have their edges folded over themselves creating quite a strong, elastic-like seal albeit at the small price of tourniquet-type blood starvation to one's lower limbs.  The body of the bag would form the plastic pant and the open top would serve as the waist opening which could be folded back down into the towel-nappy for a more dubious, but still serviceable seal.  Thusly attired, one could pee freely whilst maintaining dry outerwear and looking like awful lot like a toddler.

Presumably great minds think alike 🤣

 

[superabsorbantpolymer]

I also tried the plastic bag trick when I was a kid. As well as those hard when dry super absorbent swim towels, stolen period liners, paper towels, pillows and just about anything else I could get my hands on. The need to have a diaper firmly cradling my bottom is such a deeply ingrained and rewarding sensation for me. 

I also have a memory of playing with my childhood friend at around aged 6, and convincing him that we should make diapers out of construction paper "for poor babies who don't have any" (very mischievous kid logic). Iirc I made a brown one and put it on over my clothes. My mom interrupted at some point and I knew it was naughty so we moved on. I definitely made paper diapers after that, although they're obviously useless. Throughout my childhood I would stuff paper towels in my underwear, at home in school etc. 

[oliver d]

I think a lot of us came this route I also remember doing this at around the age of 13/14 when the urge of wanting to be in diapers hit me like a raging bull.I used to make out of black garbage bags cut to the shape of a disposable diaper  and line them with toilet paper and paper towels or old towels.Once fitted I would put a other plastic bag over them as plastic pants to prevent leaks.Got caught by my mother once nothing was said or done about it I think she thought it was just a part of growing up.. 

[Stroller]

9 hours ago, oznl said:

Presumably great minds think alike 🤣

Indeed.  Me too.  And as for wearing terry nappies at night, I always do, unless we're away on holiday or staying somewhere else that means no washing machine.  We've just come home after a week away, with me in disposables.  It was a big relief to pin myself into a dry terry nappy last night.  I didn't have any night time leaks while we were away, and in face haven't had any for a long time.  I suspect that may be in part due to using booster pads at all times, whether in cloth or disposables.  A Betterdry and a booster kept the bed dry while we were away, but I always worry a bit when I overnight in a disposable.  I suspect the booster cups my leakage area better than without, so reduces the risk of wee tracking along my skin to the outside world.  Anyway, I don't exercise any control over my wetting these days. When my body says 'go' it just happens, on my side or not.  I did have a leak while we were away, but only because I maxed out an Overnight one evening.  I was on a wooden chair, so no harm done.  And alcohol was involved - it was my birthday after all (2 again, if anyone wondered).

Today I'm in a cloth nappy with 3 cloth boosters to celebrate being back in cloth.  I should be OK till Mummy sends me to bed this evening.

[oznl]

3 hours ago, Stroller said:

 I was on a wooden chair, so no harm done.  And alcohol was involved - it was my birthday after all (2 again, if anyone wondered).

HAPPY BLOODY BIRTHDAY!!!!  You've done us all proud by over-indulging and leaking as a consequence.  That's what being in the "Terrible Twos" looks like and I salute you!  🤣

[Tadpole]

On 3/9/2024 at 1:01 PM, oznl said:

Presumably great minds think alike 🤣

Me too. Plastic bags, kitchen roll, sellotape: Leaked like a sieve.

Later on I'd buy the biggest pampers I could, cut two up and tape together to make one: Leaked like a sieve.

I didn't try my first adult disposable until I was in my 20's (Tena Super - solid green) - it was a revelation (although they still leaked, didn't they?).

[oznl]

8 hours ago, Tadpole said:

Me too. Plastic bags, kitchen roll, sellotape: Leaked like a sieve.

My shopping-bag-over-old-towel variety were surprisingly watertight.  At least at the leggings.  The waistband was a bit hit and miss but back then, I usually wasn’t able to stay in them long enough for waistband leaking to become a thing.

The thing was that the “waistband” was just the bag opening.  It had zero elasticity and basically, it was what it was from a size point of view.  I think I used pyjama drawer strings to try to keep it closed.

The leg holes were just that.  They were leg holes torn through each bottom corner of the bag that I’d through a process of “natural intelligence” (as opposed to AI) worked out worked much better if I made those holes smaller than they needed to be and then stretched them over my thighs.  I had no idea why.  It was strictly neural learning.  I knew that they just sealed tightly that way (although there was the whole tourniquet-effect going on).

Of course, now we have google and so I needed to understand what was going on.

It seems most likely that those old-school plastic bags were a fairly dense polyethylene.  An attribute of the polymer molecules from which this stuff is wrought is that they are long, chain-like structures of carbon and hydrogen.  When you pull a structure comprised of these chains of molecules in one direction, the pulling force (not the Star Wars one) arranges them more closely to one another and more aligned to each other whereupon they bind together, becoming less likely to tear apart.  For the first bit of the stretch, one is just rearranging molecules.  As the stretch progresses, one finds oneself instead attempting to BREAK those molecules which is a much tougher gig.  This allows for quite tight fit without failure of the bag.

So THAT’S why my stretched-plastic-shopping-bag-hole leg openings sealed tightly both stopping leaks and ensure that after some time I could no longer feel my ankles.

Things you never knew…

Actually, I’ll bet @Little Sherri knew that…

[Little Sherri]

6 hours ago, oznl said:

Actually, I’ll bet @Little Sherri knew that…

You did a great job explaining that. I sort of understood how this worked before, but I actually think I understand it better now. Maybe I'll get you to explain some other things I thought I knew to me as well... my wife? 

It's interesting how, via evolution in completely separate ecosystems, we all arrived at the same destination, more or less, somewhat like all the various species that employ some version of venom, although they branched off from each other long before they became venomous, and they were geographically isolated for millions of years after the continental band broke up. Yet serpents, lizards, insects and even a couple of mammals, all came up with some version of a chemical weapon delivered by a fang or spur. 

I very much recall the experiments I conducted, cutting leg holes into those wonderfully heavy white plastic shopping bags - were they better off both being entirely horizontal, or cut upward on an angle? Narrow or wide? I liked the sort of "bikini" upward slant of a real diaper, but that reduced the side coverage and made the bag a lot more likely to split, as it channeled the stretching forces to one point. Some stores gave out plain white bags, and those were coveted, but the store closest to us had a branded bag with a big red D on it (for Dominion, later to become A&P, and then, Metro). I would turn the bag inside out because I preferred the plain white look - no real diaper had a big red D on it. However, I became vexed by the transference of the ink from the red D to the white pillow case that I was using as a diaper - I would will stuff the pillow case with layered towels, and the nice thing about that setup was, the pillow case was white, so the colours of the towels didn't matter. I was a purist. I had been used to having a box of white plastic diapers entirely at my disposal for years, so being forced into DIY diapers meant anything I could come up with was substandard. 

Later, the gauge of the plastic declined, and the bags were much more prone to splitting. This also coincided, I am sure, with an increase in my height and weight, as I transformed from a child to a teenager, and I moved from shopping bags, over to doubled up kitchen trash bags where were baggy and loose on my form, except for at the legs, because I could control the size of that opening. One brand had a drawstring built into it at the waist, which was convenient, but they were really big, whereas another coveted brand were exactly the right size but did not have the drawstring. I had little to no control over what garbage bags we ended up with, however, so it was sheer luck when the right ones came through the door with the shopping. 

The one item that I had to procure independently was diaper pins, which were available at the drug store at the end of our street. I would save up my allowance money, and then slink up there, blood pounding in my ears, like I was buying narcotics, handing over $3.79 or whatever it was, for a cardboard card with a few proper diaper pins laminated to it. My mom bought safety pins for her sewing kit, but the gauge and size of them were inadequate for securing a diaper. 

Presumably, at one point, we had them in stock, but by the time I went searching for them, they had been used for other things, or discarded. I did find a cache of my sister's plastic pants in a bag in the back of the linen closet, but all but one of them were too small for me to use. There was one pair of milky white plastic pants with pink elastics that I could stretch over my frame, but they still didn't work very well, because they barely fit on me and absolutely would not fit over a diaper, unless I made one using a single towel that was more in line dimensionally with pinned on knickers, and could absorb about as much. 

[oznl]

16 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Maybe I'll get you to explain some other things I thought I knew to me as well... my wife?

I blame decades of listening to engineers and software developers before having to explain what they said to salespeople...

Regrettably there are limits to explicatory English and our spouses live beyond them.

Such things cannot be explained, they can only be experienced 🤣

 

[oznl]

Last week I reported on an unusually high frequency of bedwetting action.  This has continued.  Last night, I “wet the bed” for real (a very small bit).  At some ineffable point in the wee hours, I managed to pee over the top of my slightly-less-Betterdry disposable, dampening the elastics of my terry-lined disposable which then wicked a little bit to dampen my pyjamas and onwards to dampen bedding.  It was far from catastrophic and no 4am laundry occurred.  Alcohol WAS involved. 

That’s an aside though.  The more interesting thing is that for the last couple of weeks, I’m fairly sure I’ve bed-wet continuously during the “cloth night nappy” portion of my week:  typically Thursday to Saturday nights.

These are “balance of probabilities” bedwettings as opposed to “beyond reasonable doubt” ones.  They are not “caught in the act” moments, staged by engineering going to bed dry and conducting 2am nappy checks when I wake.  I’ve found that the practice of attempting entrapment in this way perversely seems to have an inhibiting effect on bedwetting.  It’s simply been a case of going to bed (usually a bit damp because they’ve already been on me 2 – 3 hours when I head for bed), falling asleep quickly before waking up the next morning thoroughly wet with a largely empty bladder and zero recollection of peeing.

Being cloth, it’s pretty easy notice “thoroughly wet” in the morning.  Compared to most disposables, cloth nappies feel distinctly wet after you pee in them but it’s not at all uncomfortable.  It’s a warm albeit humid embrace.  It’s that damp but warm heaviness about them that you can feel on waking and when you realise that your bum is also being enveloped by damp heaviness you know that your nappy is “thoroughly wet”:  Hello Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.

I will still bed-wet in disposables (especially if alcohol is involved) but lately it seems that I will wet the bed (or at least, pee whilst asleep) more frequently clad in cloth.

There’s no interconnection between urodynamics and what my underwear is made from so why is this so?

I don’t believe that my bedwetting has ANYTHING to do with incontinence.  In fact, incontinent people that I’ve spoken to predominately (it’s far from universal) report that if anything, they are likely to remain dry in bed.  Apparently, male plumbing in particular, doesn’t siphon out so easily when horizontal.  I’ve had incontinent males tell me that they will often awaken dry in bed, only to comprehensively wet themselves when they stand up.

I don’t believe I wet my nappies asleep because my bladder is full.  When I’ve “caught” bedwetting directly, it’s often been a fairly small wetting that’s occurred within two hours of me falling asleep.

I believe that I pee in my sleep because some level of my brain decides that it is ok for me to continue with the same voiding pattern I remain in during the day.  Some part of my brain becomes aware that there is some pee in my bladder and decides to dump it.  I’m asleep, not unconscious.  My brain is running in power-save mode but it’s not switched off.

Having studied my own insomnia, I’ve learned that sleep is NOT unconsciousness but rather an altered state of consciousness.  It’s a strange place despite us spending so much time there.  Nobody is even precisely sure what the purpose of sleep is although since its evolutionary price is so high (consider our ancestors spending one third of their lives in a state of reduced awareness whilst hungry apex predators with nasty sharp pointy teeth wander nearby) that there MUST be some overwhelming advantage conferred by it.  I certainly feel the worse for the wear when I don’t get enough of it.

The borders between deliberate and unintentional actions during sleep can be vague.  We can still make “decisions” when we’re asleep but they may not necessarily be our best ones.

So why would I “decide” to pee while asleep more frequently when clad in cloth nappies?

I suspect it’s because I think about it less: bedwetting requires a degree of thoughtlessness to take hold.

Despite years of habituation, there are still quite a few variables at play during an in-bed adult nappy wetting episode.  Am I “pointing the right way” down there?  Am I laying on my back?  Am I too wet already to get away with this?  These thoughts don’t completely disappear just because I’m asleep and almost always, the chance of spouse-enraging actual wet bedding lurks like a monster under a bed.

In a thick 60” x 60” kite folded terry nappy however, those points are completely irrelevant.  It simply does not matter which way I’m “pointing” or my rotational angle relative to the horizontal or, within reason, how wet I already am.  Heavy cloth nappies can take it.  I will be very unlikely to leak.  My beloved will lay beside me none-the-wiser and it’s therefore largely risk-free to “go for it”.

Perhaps some part of my brain still online whilst I’m asleep knows this.

It’s also entirely possible that alcohol dis-inhibits my predilection to run through those kind of pre-flight safety checks also which may well explain common-enough bedwetting in disposables after imbibing.

The “pee decision” needs to stay beneath the noise floor of my brain’s signal in order to be dealt with on auto-pilot.  If I perceive it as being in any way risky (eg: because it IS), I’ll wake myself up.  If however, either through situational reality (ludicrously effective giant cloth nappies) or the blurring capacity of more-than-sufficient wine, I think everything is ok, it seems I’ll probably just go ahead and pee without waking up.

Thinking about this, a similar “it doesn’t matter anymore” scenario would be one where I’ve actually wet the bed (as opposed to a nappy).  I know for tested fact that I MAY wet a bed if I sleep unprotected.  Once that rubicon has been crossed though, in a fully wet bed, the incremental cost of peeing in it again would be pretty much zero.  It won’t make the washing any more onerous than it already is.

So, in the eventuality of my soaking the sheets at 2am, would I then put in encore performances at 4am and 6am (assuming I could put away my discomfort at the cold wetness and fall back asleep)?

I’m not sure.  It’s difficult to see how I could conduct an experiment like this and remain married so we’ll leave it as a thought experiment for now…

[Little Sherri]

2 hours ago, oznl said:

The borders between deliberate and unintentional actions during sleep can be vague.  We can still make “decisions” when we’re asleep but they may not necessarily be our best ones.

I agree entirely. I know that when I wet overnight, without recollection of it, most of the time, I'm rolling over onto my back and making sure that mini-me is aimed at 6:00 and not at high noon. Occasionally, usually after drinking, I will wake up extraordinarily more wet than I was when I went to sleep, feeling like someone jammed a soaking wet sponge of a size usually reserved for church parking lot charity carwashes, down the back of my diaper, and the majority of the time, I will come to this awareness while laying on my stomach, which is how I usually sleep. I have on many an occasion then run a slightly shaky hand over the sheets around and under me, only to discover that there has been no breach of containment. So I know that I'm following the same protocol when I wet my diaper while unconscious, as I do when I get woken up by the sensation of a full bladder, and I do the needful while semiconscious. 

I sleep in disposables alone, most of the time. Usually good ones, but that doesn't matter - no disposable is immune to the physics of fluid dynamics, when called into active duty while enveloping the nether regions of a person sleeping on their side or on their stomach. And I rarely experience leaks. When I do, it's either the result of something unfortunate, like a folded-over front waistband wicking into the sheets, or, it happens when I've very thoroughly anesthetized myself with high-octane IPA or wine, and then I've peed flagrantly and extravagantly, without following the lockout/tagout procedures that are so deeply engrained in me. 

[superabsorbantpolymer]

I can definitely attest to the psychological safety aspect. I don't do cloth, but for the past few months in my case my mattress has several layers of protection and I am thickly diapered. I have yet to have confirmed bed wetting but the ease of which I can let go in bed is so much better than in the past. I've done long stints of 24/7 but I almost always would fall asleep after climaxing and dispose of my diaper and sleep in diapered. So not really 24/7 even tho I would diaper asap in the morning or if I woke up during the night. Now I have the habit of ensuring I am always protected. I have come leaps and bounds in terms of relaxing and letting my detrusor do the work. Reflecting, I've been doing a lot of mindfulness/meditation with regards to my voiding. My pelvic floor is relaxed and my bladder squeezes little spurts out without my permission. I am not always in that state tho, but it's easier to slip into than it's ever been. The meditation is probably good for me anyway in terms of body awareness and mental health, so may as well 😂

Re: incontinent people not bed wetting, this really would depend on the etiology of their incontinence. Someone with overactive bladder could very likely have bladder contractions lying down which force pee out. 

[oznl]

26 minutes ago, superabsorbantpolymer said:

Re: incontinent people not bed wetting, this really would depend on the etiology of their incontinence. Someone with overactive bladder could very likely have bladder contractions lying down which force pee out. 

Yes. I agree.  That's why I moderated the claim with "predominately".  I believe plain old sphincter dysfunction is the one that causes sudden showers on standing.

29 minutes ago, superabsorbantpolymer said:

I have come leaps and bounds in terms of relaxing and letting my detrusor do the work. Reflecting, I've been doing a lot of mindfulness/meditation with regards to my voiding. My pelvic floor is relaxed and my bladder squeezes little spurts out without my permission. I am not always in that state tho, but it's easier to slip into than it's ever been.

I call this my "drip and dribble zone" and over the years, it's gotten easier to get into and when I do get there, I go deeper now and stay longer. 

It's very common laying in bed after a weekend sleep in (when presumably the vasopressin is wearing off).  I wake with an empty bladder but after some time, it starts happening with a few drops or a spurt every few minutes and a curious sense of relaxed lightness in my lower abdomen.  Sometimes these days it truly is automatic and it's a bit of a mystery to me how I should stop it.  Unfortunately it usually stops by itself when I get up, thus activating my core.

[Little Sherri]

On 3/15/2024 at 3:03 AM, oznl said:

it starts happening with a few drops or a spurt every few minutes and a curious sense of relaxed lightness in my lower abdomen.

This happens to me fleetingly from time to time as well, and I have likened it in the past to coming across a deer in the woods. If I move, or stare directly at it, it's gone, and I have no ability to summon it back. It's very pleasant and perhaps it would be easier to summon if I meditated on it - I have never really meditated before, at least not deliberately. 

[oznl]

Why DO I talk about pee dreams?  This is an especially poignant question because I’ve just realised that @Little Sherri has updated his blog on exactly the same topic: pee dreams.  Maybe it’s because we’re both being shaped by the same wind tunnel for the same amount of time.  The thing is, I’d already written my update (I just hadn’t posted it) and I’m too lazy to throw it away and write a different one because:

(a)    Nothing else noteworthy happened this week

(b)   I think pee dreams are important

(c)    This one was even weirder than usual.

I'll waste no words on point (a).

Let me expound a little on point (b).  This is a strange journey I’m on.  The physiological changes are easy enough to describe.  So are the nappy rashes. What’s going on in my head?

I don’t know.  I’m already inside my head and the only view from in here is looking back “outside”.

Dreams provide some parody or reflection of things going on in my brain at depths I can’t easily pluck out and turn into words.

That, and they are stupid enough to be amusing to me.

So on to point (c).  I had quite a strange “pee dream” this week.  It was more a “non-pee dream” really.

I was attending some kind of corporate conference.  The kind I used to attend all the time in the “before” days.  For ineffable dream-reasons, one of my tasks at this conference (apart from consuming all of my table’s conference mints) was valet parking other staff member’s classic cars. 

If that wasn’t weird enough, these cars all appeared to be morphing and shrinking as I drove them. After getting in to an old Packard, I’d realise that suddenly it was a go-kart.  Another become a ride-on mower.  That wasn’t the strange bit though.  That was just run-of-the-mill dream-surrealism.  Progressive functional reductionism of initially-cool-things as I attempt to use them is a dream theme I have.  It’s probably something bleak, reflecting entropy, mortality or the inevitability of taxation but it’s not of itself unusual.

I needed to pee in this dream which is common enough these days since my bladder cruise range is permanently set to “awful”.  The strange bit was that I was depressed about this because I was going to have to find a bathroom.  Why?  I don’t know.  The dream didn’t tell me.

Suddenly we were in a new dream-scene, done with parking cars I was inside sitting at a table at the shadowy, non-specific corporate conference event that was the point of this outing.  I still needed to pee and again, I ruminated ruefully about the inescapable conclusion that I was going to have to go and find a toilet.

I’ve no idea if I was in a nappy in my dream or not.  It certainly never entered my head.

It was also depressing to me that I was “awake” (in my dream) to have to deal with this situation.  It seems that in my dream-corporate-conference, having turned fellow managers priceless collectible cars into gardening appliances, I should rightfully now be asleep (and presumably peeing my pants) rather than sitting at a cheap hotel room conference table listening to droned gibberish.

Upon reflection, the “I should be asleep” part wasn’t strange at all.  I can think of loads of corporate conferences that would have been far less depressing if I’d slept through them.

And that was it for the dream.  Like the final episode of “The Sopranos”, there was no resolution.  The screen just went dark.

I remembered all of this later when I woke at around 6:30am.  I could recall the dream vividly although for some reason, I felt it had taken place some hours earlier.  I was also initially sleep-befuddled-confused because I thought I wasn’t wearing a nappy and yet, I could feel the wet warmth of cloth pinned against me.  It was only then I remembered it was Sunday and I was in fact pinned into a terry nappy under plastic pants.  I then remembered that I’m in nappies EVERY night.  It seems I’d somehow forgotten that.

I remembered that I’d never actually gotten around to an actual pee in that dream and assumed I had a full bladder.  Laying there in the early grey light, I relaxed.  I did wet a little but it wasn’t very much at all.  Maybe I’d gone on to wet my nappy after the dream but really I’ve no idea.  Waking up thinking I wasn’t in a nappy was new too.

I’m still trying to work out what THAT all means…

 

[oznl]

This week I’m down to my last case of “free” Abena L4.  Just another month or three and I’m actually going to have to start buying some nappies for around the house on weekends.  Of course the great tragedy of the Abena L4 is that there are not so much an “around my house” nappy as an “around my ankles” one: such is their egregious sagginess and general preoccupation with gravity.  It’s a great shame.  The nappy core on the Abena is super-comfortable (despite a mild predilection for disintegration) and it’s generally reasonably absorbent as well.  Nice nappies, shame about the shape shifting.

Anyway, on Saturday evening, I slid down my plastic pants only to have my soggy-but-far-from-soaked Abena slide down my thighs in sympathy (I was about to change myself anyway) and I pondered that how as a species, we could develop a probe (nearly 50 years ago) that has made it all the way into interstellar space and yet we are unable to design a cost-effective adult nappy that stays put after somebody pees in it.  Sure, I accept that ABDL nappies generally speaking do a much better job but they’re still not NASA standard and in any case, nobody in a care facility gets treated to a Rearz “Barnyard” anyway.

I got to thinking.

In my early phases of Einsteinian reflection, I wondered if the problem might not be less, well, problematic if wicking (a perennial shortcoming in adult nappies) was improved.  Wicking is what lets nappies disperse inbound pee-load across all of the available absorbent surface.  If wicking is limited, causing pee to pile up at “ground zero” so to speak, in addition to premature product failure (leaks), the localised load can accentuate sagging and stretching (at the triple costs of efficacy, discretion, and staying where you put them).  Are you reading this Abena engineers?). 

It did seem that the ‘pee-load’ in my Abena was at least slightly concentrated into a particular zone leading to some asymmetry in the gravitational tug.  My Abenas were sinking down my thighs with as little as 30% of the available absorbent surface area wet.  In my most recent product failure, it was a predominately dry nappy with a kind of potato of wet SAP pulling things down at the front.

Sure wicking is a thing but the Abena isn’t as nearly bad at this as some of the more ludicrously-capacity-claimed ABDL product.  The primary problem here is stretch and sag.  

I moved on to considering how structural integrity of the nappy might be maintained through the “loading cycle”.

I got to thinking about SAP and its propensity to swell when exposed to fluid.  This kind of wetting-induced force and torque got me pondering about patterned SAP sub-structures built into the nappy core that would serve to defend against, and perhaps even counteract sagging as they became wet by reshaping themselves into sag-resistant forms.

And then I started googling only to discover that it’s already been done: by Cambridge University no less.  

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/wearable-technologies/article/origamiinspired-systems-that-improve-adult-diaper-performance-to-enhance-user-dignity/EE49123E2F043C7A5F87BF2EAB71B492

It turns out re-engineering the present unstructured SAP core of nappy into “tubes” of SAP permits liquid-activated shaping.  When you wet them, they distort to fit you more closely.

Just to ram home their general cleverness, they’d also applied some solid mechanical engineering to the problem of “wicking” (or specifically, the lack thereof).  It turns out that wicking can be radically improved by using folded/overlaid “surge layers” inside the nappy (as opposed to the single layer we see today) for pee dispersal.

And because good things come in threes, the nappy-boffins decided to leverage something called “laminar emergent torsion” to create a nappy waistband that “deploys” (like the solar panels on a satellite) to improve fit, flexibility and simplify application.  I guess a nappy that’s easier to put on would be good for people with disabilities but I also imagine that it could play a role in the hands of a drunk ABDL also which for me, is a much less distressing thought.  It’s still something of a tertiary objective.

It was nice to know that at least some of my thought bubbles were in fact feasible but I don’t think we’re about to see them appearing in padded products any time soon.

Firstly, I expect that nappy making machines are very expensive, very established and very NOT designed to engineer that kind of complexity into extruded pads.  Current manufactured nappy cores are more meat loaf than terrine.  We’d most likely need an entirely new manufacturing infrastructure as well as a manufacturing process and that’s a lot of non-recurrent cost to build a product that would in all likelihood NOT be cheaper.

That leads me to my second point.  Adult nappies (medical brands) are overwhelmingly NOT a user-chooser product.  I suspect that their efficacy and comfort takes a back seat to their capacity to win institutional tenders by being the cheapest.  The fact that they don’t work very well is irrelevant.  It’s somebody else’s department to change the wet bedding.

So we probably won’t see these scientifically-designed uber-nappies but it’s nice to know that metaphorically at least, nappies are a product you CAN engineer the crap out of (at least metaphorically until nano-bots go mainstream) and it isn’t rocket science.

Elon Musk might build them though.  He’s a bit like that…

[Little Sherri]

On 3/28/2024 at 8:38 AM, oznl said:

It turns out re-engineering the present unstructured SAP core of nappy into “tubes” of SAP permits liquid-activated shaping.  When you wet them, they distort to fit you more closely.

This was a fascinating read! I haven't seen very many academic treatments on diaper structural engineering. This technology has indeed been utilized, by no less than Pampers - they introduced tubular absorbance cambers within the center of the Pampers Cruiser a few years ago, and advertised it via promising "no more cowboy walk" for your toddler, which I guess is a way of dumbing down and jazzing up "improved wicking and liquid-activated shaping." I had some of the size 7's in my inventory for a while, right at the tail end of when any kid I knew could possibly fit in them, and then they became stuffers. They did exactly what the commercial said they would, and what the authors at Cambridge describe as well - the tubes of SAP swelled into essentially a bundle of sausages welded together laterally, which resisted sagging and also tended to channel further onslaughts of fluid into the further reaches of the diaper. 

But, to your later point, 

On 3/28/2024 at 8:38 AM, oznl said:

Adult nappies (medical brands) are overwhelmingly NOT a user-chooser product.

Whereas the people buying toddler diapers are the CEO's of the entire operation, generally, and responsible for both the laundry budget, and the diaper budget, as well as being faced with cleaning the car seat, the bed, possibly the crook of their arm, or their shoulders, etc, when a diaper fails. So some are willing to pony up for the improved technology, or else they'd be shopping for store brand diapers at Walmart. 

There's also a disconnect with respect to diaper performance versus perceptions on standards of care for the very young versus the very old. Baby diapers frequently claim "up to 12 hours of protection" on the packaging, whereas the idea that grandma would be macerating for 12 hours is intolerable... right? But how important is uninterrupted sleep? I absolutely agree that if grandma dispenses last night's now-processed beef wellington into her nappy, she should be changed posthaste. But when the lights go out at 9 PM on the ward, don't wake her up for a change at 1 AM and again at 5 AM, under the auspices of hygiene and skin integrity, both of which are only at risk because she's wearing a taped-on garbage bag full of lint. Put her in a Mega Inspire+ and unless she's judging beer contests, she's never even going to know she's wet, before the lights come up and it's time for the morning's thickened prune juice. 

[oznl]

4 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

This was a fascinating read! I haven't seen very many academic treatments on diaper structural engineering. This technology has indeed been utilized, by no less than Pampers - they introduced tubular absorbance cambers within the center of the Pampers Cruiser a few years ago, and advertised it via promising "no more cowboy walk" for your toddler, which I guess is a way of dumbing down and jazzing up "improved wicking and liquid-activated shaping."

Well another day another thing learned!  I had no idea that this concept had made the leap into production but then again, I've never paid any attention (or attempted to leverage) kids nappy technology:  my loss it seems.

That says to me if nothing else that scaled manufacturing technology for that process exists.  The Cambridge dissertation also seems to imply that it's not caged by patents.  There is demonstrable prior art.

It just remains for one of the significant ABDL nappy builders to call time-out on the SAP quantity arms race and exploit some technology to better utilise what they are already dialing in to their (presently unstructured) nappy core.

The ball is in your court Rearz/Tykable/Northshore etc...

[jeremy12312]

Here’s the mechanism in action, saving me from having ignored the almost overflowing drip dray on my espresso machine. 

Looks and feels like an inflatable raft in a pool. 

[Little Sherri]

1 hour ago, jeremy12312 said:

Here’s the mechanism in action

This is exactly what the Pampers did as well. 

[oznl]

The Easter holiday break and an associated series of social engagements had disrupted my usual non-workday nappy routine.  Pinned cloth terry nappies are great but they’re not great at dinner parties: at least the kind of dinner parties I find myself at.  Maybe I should find some different kind of dinner party.  Anyway, I found myself unusually alternating between cloth and disposables from night to night over a very long Easter Holiday weekend depending on what was going on.   

Thursday night was disposable instead of cloth (dinner party), Friday was cloth, Saturday was back in disposables (a “Little Mermaid” no less to handle an anticipated 14 hour shift after a much “wetter” dinner party). 

That’s all well and good but as the long weekend wore on, I’d started notice a very faint and intermittent stale pee note in the walk in robe.  The cat died some months ago so my first line on enquiry was closed to me but in any case, it wasn’t really strong enough to make me think I wasn’t imagining it.  You can get a bit olfactory-paranoid when you pee in your pants all the time.

Sunday was cloth again but at Monday night, work beckoned and so, quite late, quite refreshed, I found myself groping around the just-out-of-sight-line top shelf grasping to retrieve my in-service pair of double-terry lined plastic pants.  I habitually wear a pair of these over my night time disposables (do deal with the almost inevitable minor night time leakage) but usually they can go a week or two before consignment to wash.

Sensing plastic at my fingertips up above my head, I dragged an item forward to the edge of the shelf whereupon it pitched over the edge to land at my feet with a surprisingly dull “whump”.

That “whump” did seem somehow, well, solid.

And then, like a mushroom cloud arising from a nuclear test, a blast of pure ammonia roared up from them to the stratosphere at my nose.

So THAT’S where that subtle waft was emanating from.  It wasn’t at all subtle now that the source was down at ground level.

Bending down to retrieve them, I discovered heavy, cold, sodden towelling and if my nose was to be believed, a pee-party for bacteria.

Why were they soaked?  In some kind of mad moment, I wondered if the roof had leaked above them.  It seemed unlikely despite the Easter weekend’s near non-stop rainfall.  My folded terry nappies were up on that same top shelf and they seemed dry enough.

I was left with Occam’s razor telling me that I’d had a catastrophic overnight disposable nappy failure in them two days ago.  With my all-new, all-improved “Slightly-less-BetterDry) this is no longer as rare as it was a couple of nappy cases ago.  Furthermore, in a new low for my nappy-insight, I’d failed to realise that this had occurred at my morning change and instead, flung an utterly-pee-drenched double-terry nappy/plastic pant combo up into the warm, humid confines of a tropically-wet Queensland Easter weekend walk-in robe shelf and let it ferment for a couple of days.

Awesome.

For several hundreds of milliseconds I contemplated putting them on anyway.  It was late, it was dark, I’d drunk a vat of red wine.  I was tired.  I wanted bed.  Fortunately, sanity prevailed.  Apart from looking suspiciously squishy, I concluded that wearing that particular additional “protection” garment to bed was not only maritally inadvisable, it was arguably a bio-hazard, such was the NH3 off-gassing going on.

On the other hand, I dimly knew that the red wine on-board would substantially increase the chances of unauthorised nocturnal pee emissions.  No insurance policy for my slightly-less-BetterDry was also not a great idea.

I’d have to find a clean pair from my nappy hamper back in the main bedroom, just beyond where my beloved lay dozing gently.

I crept across the room in semi-darkness and tried, as much as was possible, to surreptitiously ferret through my wicker basket of nappy accessories in the dark.

“huh?  What’s happening?” my beloved mumbled.

“Nothing dear” I replied, standing before her in full view.

It is a credit to the normalisation of my strange life that she accepted my assurance of “nothing” at face value, rolling over to swiftly fall back asleep as, silhouetted by the dim yellow LED night light, her husband, wearing nothing more than a slightly swollen-at-the-front disposable nappy, sorted through piles of plastic pants in his “nappy hamper” sorting out his bedwetting gear in the hope of keeping the marital sheets dry.

Strange days indeed.

[Little Sherri]

I discovered earlier this week that I had thrown a pair of socks into my diaper bin, and a balled-up wet BeDry into the laundry hamper. Luckily, I made this discovery, when I was tossing my next diaper, and came across the perplexing sight of a pair of socks on top of a rockpile of sodden disposables, before doing some quick reverse-engineering of how that could have come to be, which brought me to digging in the laundry for a BeDry. I would never have heard the end of it, if either of my housemates had been loading the washer, and come across a 10 lb plastic air un-freshener. And God forbid it had actually made it into the washer - my youngest daughter in particular is not very careful about what she loads in there. I've found a slipper, a pull-up (hers), and about 700 ruined $10 tubes of lip balm in there since she started "helping" with the laundry. 

I was thinking of you this week @oznl, because I finally got my hands on a BeDry Elitecare, the spiritual successor to your beloved, departed Barry (Rearz' Incontrol Elite Hybrid Diaper, for the uninitiated). 

I think you might be disappointed. The BeDry Night might be a better substitution. The Night version costs $3.91 CAD each and claims a ludicrous 12,000 ml of capacity - but we all know that's a marketing halcyon dream. The Elitecare claims an only-ridiculous 10,000 ml (22 lbs!) of capacity, at $3.34 per unit, but that 15% lower price gets you 17% less capacity, so it's a wash. I found them comfortable, and the hook/loop fasteners are bulletproof, but in the Rearz style, it started leaking at the top of the back of my thighs when it was at maybe 60% of usable capacity. The inner top sheet also pulled away from the cover at the front waistband, although that didn't effect its function at all - it's just a tasting note. The Night version did that, too, although it took longer to happen, but they didn't leak at the thighs until much further into their mission. 

There's so much SAP lavished on the cores of both of them that they form a bit of a fluidic logjam, which inhibits load-sharing with still-thirsty further reaches of the diaper. You are prone to wearing plastic pants, so some of this might not bother you as much as it bothered me, and I will say this - once I dug out plastic pants and put them on, I then wore that diaper until it was the weight of an obese dead cat (sorry - too soon?) - I think I was in it for 20 hours in total, and at that point it was soaked from stem to stern and was crying uncle both in terms of how it looked, and, the miasma that hung in the air around me. So, you can force an Elitecare to extremes, but it goes there a bit reluctantly, whereas Barry seemed up for anything, and the Mega Inspire+ is the devil on your shoulder whispering "you're fine, just relax, have another drink, I've got you..." 

[oznl]

8 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I discovered earlier this week that I had thrown a pair of socks into my diaper bin, and a balled-up wet BeDry into the laundry hamper.

Yep.  This kind of stuff is happening more frequently.  The optimistic take is that after 5 years, contempt has overtaken familiarity.  The pessimistic take is that this is cognitive decline and before long, we'll all be incontinent anyway although ironically sentenced to dysfunctional institutional bags of tissue paper.

8 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

So, you can force an Elitecare to extremes, but it goes there a bit reluctantly, whereas Barry seemed up for anything, and the Mega Inspire+ is the devil on your shoulder whispering "you're fine, just relax, have another drink, I've got you..." 

The "daily driver" selection is currently 100% Mega Inspire+ and I've gone numb to the expense.  The "BeDry" is even MORE expensive (and has very limited availability).

I don't know why Rearz are so prone to leaks at the rear thighs but it is something of a brand hallmark.  The Inspire Mega will do it to but it takes much more provocation.  With the Barry, it was routine.

[oznl]

So this weekend past I again dropped my beloved at the airport on Friday morning for a long weekend with her girlfriends interstate.  Three days alone afforded me the strange kind of inverted opportunity that presents to those of us who chose to live their entire lives in nappies:  the chance of sneakily spending a weekend NOT wearing nappies.  Just to see what still works and what doesn’t.

Not Friday though.  There was a road trip involved and I know enough already to know that such an event would NOT end well, especially since I was to be driving my beloved’s car.  Definitely nappies for THAT trip.

After the early morning drop-and-kiss at the airport (you have 30 seconds before a parking storm-trooper strides purposely towards you with a clipboard), I needed to head about 1.5 hours drive up the coast to supervise some works at our other house in a Rearz Inspire+ Mega.  The Rearz saw abundant, full use of the course of the day.  I never even made it from the airport to the city limits without needing to wet it a little.  When I came home early evening that day however took it off, had a shower and replaced it with a thin, close-to-useless, underwear-styled pull-up that I had laying about.  I used a pull up because:

(a)    I couldn’t find my last known remaining pair of underpants

(b)   It was yet another rain-soaked weekend and I was trying to minimise washing, just in case accidents happened

I then proceeded to pee in the toilet by sharp necessity every 60 minutes until bedtime.  It wasn’t much pee but the urges went from “none” to “toilet NOW” in as little as 10 minutes.

I then went to bed in that same (dry) pull-up.

It was unlikely that this pull-up would handle a full-on bedwetting but I punted that it had enough to let me get away with at least one “leak” and I could just change it out for any further nocturnal emissions.  I needed to avoid having to wash pee-soaked bedding as it was yet another rain-addled La Nina weather weekend.  A full on wet bed would be a logistical problem.

I woke suddenly at 2:24am and realised I was about to pee.  I leapt out of bed and made a beeline for the toilet where ensued, a very slow and weak pee in the socially conventional location.  It looked like however under the harsh glare of the bathroom light that I was possibly a little late to the game.  I’d found my “equipment” was a little wet already upon extraction and there was a small wet spot at the inside front of my pull-up.  I think it must have been a pee squirt that woke me whereupon I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be doing that.

I had to get up and pee again at 4:30 and again at 7am which sucked.

I thought my pull-up was basically dry next morning but pulling it for a rather novel “upon arising” pee, I found the crotch to be suspiciously yellow at the front and that the wetness markers had disappeared there.  It certainly wasn’t VERY wet but it had seen *some* action.  I’m not sure if that was the fugitive squirt that happened at 2:30 before I’d actually realised what was about to happen (which would have to have been much bigger than I’d thought) or if there’d been some minor leakage later, or both.

The next day was more of the same:  I had to pee hourly with urgency.  Each pee episode was weak, small and preceded by a veritable Mariachi band of urges.  I didn’t bother trying to hold on to see if I would wet myself.  I knew I would before long, that the process would be painful and trigger yet more washing.

It was a pretty annoying day really, not helped by the fact that I was painting a garage.

At some point during the day however, Queensland’s autumnal pollen-dump arrived bringing on my usual allergic reaction.  After enduring a slightly sniffy and red-eyed hour or so, I sneezed violently, and unexpectedly.

I also unexpectedly-and-simultanously squirted into my pull-up.  I felt it plain as day and the perfunctory check for a wet spot in my pull up (there was one) was a mere formality.  The weird thing was that I didn’t even need to pee!

THAT’S new.   I don’t have a post-partum body.  I’ve leaked whilst coughing before but that’s always been in the context of being in, or close to, my “drip and dribble” zone whereby I’ve relaxed my pelvic floor and allowed myself to use my nappies near-reflexively.  This was NOT the case here.  I was concentrating on being continent and was (up until the sneeze), perfectly dry and wet myself a tiny bit uncontrollably anyway.

I then went to bed that evening and proceeded to keep my pull-up dry all night be dint of being awoken by my bladder to get up and pee every two to three hours.  As far as I could tell, I did not sleep wet at all overnight.

Then Sunday arrived: another day of hourly peeing.  How very, VERY tiresome.

Mercifully, Sunday night rolled around and I taped myself into a BetterDry, fell into bed, woke up needing to pee at 2am and did so this time without getting up.

I don’t remember any further pee events until Monday so presumably (on night 3), bedwetting returned.

So that’s what things look like.  That’s after 5 non-stop years of nappies and avoiding any bladder control.

It’s not much of a result really: unreliable bedwetting and some frequency/urgency during the day.

I guess you’d call it “dependency”.

Perhaps instead of the “12 Month Guide” they should call it the “12 Year Guide” because that’s what the glide slope here looks like.

This, after no less than 5 years of uninterrupted nappies.  On that slight pee-whiff of failure, I’ll defer commenting further on the 5 year anniversary until another time…