Who Wears the Pants - Part 7
by Jennifer Loraine
Howard was so intent on getting more milk that he wasn't aware that Anita had silently walked into the room and was watching him while he nursed and pooped. A slow smile grew on her face as the smell of a dirty diaper hit her. Anita had called earlier to see how he was doing and was told about his accidents. When the supervisor had called and told her what had happened when they attempted to diaper him, she wasn't surprised at his reaction. She had told them she agreed with their decision to put him in a playpen for an extended timeout and suggested they leave him in the playpen for the balance of the afternoon. She had told them that his regressive behavior must have meant that he wanted to be treated like a baby and that it would probably make him feel more secure if they put him in the nursery with the other babies. Anita suggested that they give him his milk in a baby bottle to reinforce his sense of security. The supervisor agreed immediately to Anita's suggestions for the handling of the little hellion. She wanted Howard's disruptive influence on the other children to be removed as soon as possible. Anita's rationalization for treating him like an infant meshed perfectly with the supervisor's understanding of child psychology. Once Howard was reduced to helpless dependence, he would become more tractable.
Howard opened his eyes to see Anita grinning at him while he sucked on the bottle. He got up and stood unsteadily in her presence as much out of fear as out of respect. The thick diaper between his legs made it difficult to stand up straight. The padding bunched up between his legs and forced them farther apart than he was used to; as a result, he had to use the unsteady bowlegged stance of a diapered infant. He swayed uncertainly on his feet and had to grasp the railing of the playpen with one hand to stay upright while his other hand still held the bottle. The attendant left the room for a few minutes, giving Anita the chance to lean over the railing of the playpen and whisper in Howard's ear as she began deep massaging his lower tummy just above his diaper, "Well, I think you've managed to convince them that you're a very immature three-year-old. All in all, Mommy is very pleased with your little performance here today. The supervisor was so impressed with how young you acted that she told Mommy that she feels sorry for you because you've lost your real mommy. She thinks you need to be allowed to regress back to babyhood when you're here so you can get over the absence of your mommy. She also recommended that you be treated the same way at home too and Mommy agreed with her."
Anita stopped and paused dramatically for her last statement and continued, "You were very naughty! So for the next two weeks, they're going to keep you with the babies here in the nursery rather than let you set a bad example for the other toddlers at the Daycare Center."
Howard frowned around the nipple but continued to suck as Anita said, "It won't be so bad, Honeybunch! Mommy promises you'll get used to diapers in a few days."
She glanced around the room and said in a gentle scolding tone, "Mommy heard about the fight you gave them when they tried to diaper you. It appears that you lost the battle in more ways than one."
She chuckled and grinned, "It looks like it will take some getting used to so you can stand without falling while wearing dydees! Don't worry, Sweetiepie, after a couple of days, you'll be waddling around here easily in your dydees like all the other infants. Do you like drinking from a ba-ba, Honeybunch? Maybe Mommy should get you some bottles so you can nurse at home too! Mommy doesn't think you'll have a problem with getting the attendants to care for you just like you were one of the babies. You look soooo cute in your dydees with your ba-ba in your mouth! You look like you fit right in with the other babies here, Sweetie!"
Anita kissed his cheek and said, "You make an adorable infant, Sweetiepie!"
She stopped massaging him when she felt a tiny contraction from his lower bowel underneath her fingertips. Anita smiled warmly at him and put her hand on the back of his diaper to pat his bottom lightly as if comforting him. As expected, the deep abdominal massage had stimulated his bowels into evacuating themselves again. This time however, his bladder had responded as well. Howard could feel the front of his diaper become warm as he soaked it with pee. She patted his diapered bottom a little harder, pushing on the pile of warm poop that he had expelled against his behind. Howard's expression changed to one of surprised dismay when he realized the horrible thing he had done in Anita's presence. Anita said sweetly, "Weren't you aware of the fact that you had pooped in your dydee? Oh dear, Mommy can see by your face that you just realized it! Poor baby! Didn't you know that most babies your age poop while standing? Poor Howie, Mommy can see that you didn't intend to make a poopy! You need to sit down if you don't want to mess in your dydees!"
Anita put her hand behind his knees and forced them to bend. As his legs folded, Howard collapsed in slow motion to the pad of the playpen. His bottom hit first, spreading the soft mess in the back of his diaper over his bottom. Howard wanted to cry. Not only had his incontinence provoked the daycare workers to put him in diapers, but he had proved they were right by promptly filling them with poop! They would never let him go back to training pants now! He kicked his legs petulantly and felt himself pee again.
"Oh dear, just look at the time!", Anita said in mock concern, "Mommy's break is almost over! Mommy has to go back to work, Sweetheart, she just wanted to see if you were okay. Mommy will be sure to tell your attendant that you have a poopy dydee so she can change you as soon as possible. Mommy will be back in a little while to take you home. Mommy has some shopping to do and is going to leave work early today. Now behave yourself and let the attendant change you without a fuss. If you don't let them change your dirty dydee, you're going to have a terrible case of dydee rash. Now wave bye-bye for Mommy! That's a good baby! Mommy will see you later!"
Howard sat in the warm ooze of his diaper, weeping tears of failure and abandonment as Anita left to return to her office. Presently his attendant returned and lifted him from the playpen. She carried him to the changing station and laid him on his back, then pulled off the tabs on the disposable he was wearing. Howard gazed helplessly up into the attendant's face as she undiapered him. As she lifted the front of his diaper gingerly and brought it down between his legs to expose the mess in the rear of his diaper, he averted his eyes towards the ceiling in embarrassment. She took one look at the brown mess that had spread over his bottom and shook her head, saying, "Ooooh, you're one stinky little boy!"
Howard closed his eyes in shame at her comment as a fresh flow of tears began leaking from the corners of his eyes. "Don't cry, Sugar! We'll get you cleaned up and in a fresh diaper in a few minutes. Then you'll be our sweet baby again," said the attendant as she took his ankles in one hand, raised his legs and used the back of the diaper to scrape the muck from his behind.
Once most of the mess had been removed, she slid the diaper out and laid it to one side. Then she took one of the baby wipes from the tub at the station and finished cleansing him with the towelette. Howard was mortified by the procedure. He felt as if his ego had been shattered into millions of infinitesimal shards by the experience; he was beyond regrowth and rebuilding. A fey thought crossed his mind as he felt his legs lifted again and his bottom lowered onto the surface of the clean diaper, "How did the rhyme he had learned so long ago go? ...All the King's horses and all the King's men, couldn't put Howard together again..."
Howard giggled insanely at his unvoiced joke as the attendant pulled the diaper up between his legs and began taping the loose ends of the diaper together. Howard knew at that moment that whatever happened in the future, he would never be the man he had been before. Something important had broken inside. He would never be able to dictate to a woman again. They were the strong ones who would make the decisions and tell him what to do. Howard would be content to lie passively and accept whatever they desired for him.
The attendant smiled at his gay giggle, it was obvious that her charge was adapting to life at the Daycare Center. She picked up his limp body and carried the unresisting tot to an unoccupied crib for his "official" afternoon nap. After having raised the side of the crib, she went to Howard's playpen and retrieved his plushy duckie, blankie and his pacifier. She returned to his crib and tucked the toy in his arms and put the pacifier in his grateful mouth. Howard cuddled the soft velveteen of his duckie to his chest to comfort his bruised ego and sucked unconsciously on the pacifier's nipple while the attendant tucked the blankie around his diminished body. He lay in the crib with huge unblinking eyes for a few minutes before the lids became to heavy to keep open and he drifted off into a deep dreamless slumber.
When Howard awoke, the nursery hadn't changed. The nursery smells of poop, stale pee and the perfume of freshly opened packages of disposable diapers mixed together to form an aroma that was well-known to every mother and daycare worker. For the infants in the nursery with Howard, the bouquet of nursery odors merely smelled like home. Howard thought that the smell was vaguely familiar. He wasn't able to pick out the individual odors from the mix, but the sweet-sour combination of fragrances triggered long forgotten memories of a time of utter contentment that lay buried in the deepmost recesses of his unconscious. His pacifier was still in his mouth and his duckie was still clutched in his arms. He had kicked off his blankie in his sleep to lay in a tangle at his feet. Howard yawned hugely, allowing the pacifier to fall from his mouth and dangle from its ribbon. He moved his legs to stretch them luxuriantly, making the plastic on his diaper crinkle in response. "What's that noise?", Howard thought, "Oh, yeah,....It must be my diapers. I wonder if I wet them again while I was sleeping?"
Howard put his hand down and tried to put it in his diaper. He couldn't, the diaper had been fastened too snuggly against his waist. He took his hand and pushed against the outside of his diaper to force the lining against his skin. If it was wet, the close contact with his skin would be more than sufficient to allow him perceive any pee trapped within its confines. When Howard held the diaper tightly against his crotch, he could feel a slight dampness beneath the clothlike paper liner that separated his skin from the absorbent padding of the diaper. He had dribbled while he slept, but not truly wet the diaper. Howard wasn't sure if that was an improvement over his previous behavior or not. Was his bladder so uncontrolled that he would only dribble continuously? Or was it an indication of a little leakage from an almost full bladder? He didn't feel like he needed to go. Howard lay back on the mattress and closed his eyes again. It was good to lay there and let the mattress cradle his body. They would tell him when it was time to move and carry him there when it was time to go. It wasn't as if he had someplace of his own to go or some job he had contracted to do. His responsibility for his life had ended the moment he had entered the nursery. All that was required of him was acquiescent compliance with his attendant's wishes. He wouldn't have been able to oppose them even if he had had the desire to confront his caretakers. Howard's battered will had receded into a hidden cave of his mind to cower in the darkness until the time was right to reemerge. Until then, he could only passively observe and wait, obeying the women who had become the mistresses of his fate.
Howard lay shut his eyes and relaxed in the crib, drifting in and out of sleep. While he lay in repose, his hand wormed its way up to his face and inserted its thumb between his lips. Occasionally, he would suck on his thumb as he dreamed, then his mouth would become flaccid again as he descended back into a deep infantine slumber.
Interlude IIX From Water Does All Life Begin
Dateline: Sunday July 03, 2011 Excerpt From a Major Television News Program:
Good Evening, the rising waters from the Atlantic are causing major damage to
the eastern seaboard tonight. The governors of virtually every Eastern Seaboard
state has declared an emergency as unexpectedly high tides inundate the coastal
areas.
Chapter Seven
Baby Howie
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Essays, "Self-Reliance" (First Series, 1841).
Howard awoke in the attendant's arms as he was carried to the counter in the front of the daycare. Anita was waiting for him and took the groggy child in her arms to carry him to the Suburban. She wrapped his shoulders and bottom in his blankie and put her arm beneath his bottom to support him as she walked. Howard blinked his eyes in the bright sun as Anita strolled through the parking lot and winded her way through the parked cars to theirs. The blankie felt indescribably soft and comforting against the bare skin of his thighs and calves, making him feel secure and protected against stranger's stares. She stopped in front of the Suburban, unlocked her door, then opened it and triggered the locks on the other doors. Then she opened the rear door and sat Howard on the seatntShe buckled him in his seat and shut the door, getting in the driver's seat and starting the van.
Howard wondered sleepily as they drove away why Anita hadn't taken the time to redress him in his accustomed training pants. As the wisps of sleep cleared themselves from his mind, he realized that he had wet them all and that there was nothing left to wear home. He lay back against the cushion of the seat and closed his eyes again. There was nothing of interest for him to see out of the window anyway, he had grown too short to see anything out of the window but the tops of buildings and trees as the Suburban whizzed by. If he hadn't been wearing the seat belt, he might have moved next to the door and been able to peer over the window frame to see the cars below. Other than sixteen or eighteen wheeler trucks, the view of the road traffic was hidden from him by his position on the back seat. After a short time, the van slowed and came to a halt as Anita parked the van. She got out and took him from the rear seat, then carried him through the busy parking lot. Howard opened his eyes and saw that she was heading for the grocery store in front of them. He was instantly awake. "Oh God! Oh please God, don't let her take me in there! Everyone will see me in diapers!", he prayed silently.
Anita sat him in the baby seat of a shopping cart and wheeled him inside the grocery store. To Howard's dismay, she went directly to the baby goods aisle and put a large package of diapers in the basket. Then she wheeled the cart further down the aisle and began filling the basket with baby food. Howard groaned inwardly when he turned and saw the jars she had selected for him. Instead of getting the barely edible jars of chunky toddler-style food, she had elected to purchase food that was suitable for a toothless infant. Everything was of the "First Foods" variety, and had been pureed to a fine paste to make it easy for a pre-weaned infant to swallow. She moved around the aisle and began putting other baby items in the cart: diaper pins, feeding bibs in disposable, terry and plastic styles, baby wipes, shampoo, a large jar of nursery vaseline, Johnson's baby soap, baby powder, feeding spoons and bowls, wash cloths, waterproof lap pads, a teething ring, a rattle, a group of large plastic toy keys, a bottle and nipple brush, an enclosed wire rack for washing nipples and pacifiers in the dishwasher, and a small box of wet wipes in a plastic purse-sized travel case.
When he saw her place several baby bottles in the cart along with packages of orthodontic nipples for an older baby, Howard slumped forward in his seat in despair. She had been serious when she told him that she planned to treat him like an infant at home. He tried to bury his head against her in embarrassment as she wheeled him through the aisles to the checkout stand but the one foot distance was too great to span with his reduced body. He was forced to endure the tolerant smiles and disapproving frowns of the women shoppers they passed as they saw the diapers and bottles that were intended for the older toddler in Anita's cart. Many of them had older boys who were still in diapers but allowing a toddler Howie's age to drink from a bottle was highly disapproved of by most women. It was bad enough that little boys nowadays took such a long time to be potty trained, but treating them like real infants was beyond the pale. The line was mercifully short and the checker too harried to make any comments on his too infantile treatment as Anita paid for her purchases and they were bagged. The sole discordant note was when the checker handed the last bag to Anita and she smiled and waved bye-bye to the diapered child in the cart. Anita took Howard's hand as if he was developmentally retarded and waved it for him, saying "Wave bye-bye, Howie! Bye-bye! That's a good baby!"
On the way home in the van, Howard whined in babytalk from the back seat that he was hungry. Anita nodded patiently and pulled the Suburban into a McDonalds. Howard had hoped that she would order from the drive through window so he could skulk home with and hide his shame from the world. Instead, he was mortified when she carried him in the fast food restaurant wearing nothing but his diaper. She ordered a burger and a Happy Meal, paid and was given a number to claim their food. Then she carried him over to the dining area and found a group of high chairs lined up next to the wall. Anita moved one the chairs to an empty booth and strapped him into the chair before going back to retrieve their food. Howard looked over at the family seated in the booth next to theirs and saw that they had a little boy who appeared to be the about the same age as himself. Unfortunately for Howard, the resemblance ended there. The toddler in the next booth was fully dressed in a T-shirt and pants. The mother at the next table glanced at Howard's diapers meaningfully and smiled condescendingly at his diapered condition. Howard blushed hotly when he realized that the woman thought that he was an older toddler who hadn't matured enough to master potty training. Anita returned a minute later and sat down beside him in the booth with a tray of food. She opened the boxed Happy Meal and carefully unwrapped the small burger like an indulgent mother with a backward child. Anita opened her purse and took out a small package that she had retrieved from the grocery bags and stuffed in her purse before she unbuckled his seat belt and lifted him out of the van. She ripped the top of the plastic bag and pulled out an flat folded yellow-colored object decorated with charming little drawings of quacking ducks with orange bills and laid it on the table before stuffing the plastic bag back in her purse. Howard wondered what the object was, but wished she would get on with what she was doing before his hamburger got cold. He was hungry! Then Anita stood up and shook out the yellow object and stepped behind Howard's chair. She bent over him from the rear and fastened the object around his neck. When Howard looked down and saw it, he realized for the first time what the thing was. She had put a disposable feeding bib on him! The bright yellow bib stood out in the room like a signpost announcing his inability to feed himself without making a mess. Even worse, the drawings of the little blue quacking ducks were so cute that they attracted the attention of anyone who could see them! Howard caught the amused glance of the mother in the booth next to them and wanted to slip down out of his high chair and hide his humiliation under the table. He would have too, if he hadn't been strapped in place. Anita had made him look even younger by adding the feeding bib to his already infantine appearance. She sat down again and passed his burger to him, saying, "Eat your Happy Meal, Sweetheart, and Mommy will let you play with your new toy! Once we get home, Mommy will put you to bed so you can go nap-nap!" The mother in the booth next to them smiled at Howard as he clumsily took the burger from Anita's hand and began to eat. Howard blushed in embarrassment at the woman's attention and concentrated on eating his meal. The next thing he heard was a voice saying, "Hi Anita! What a surprise meeting you here! And who is this? I didn't know you had a little boy! Are you babysitting for a friend?" Anita chuckled merrily and said, "Hi yourself, Susan! No, he's not mine. I'm just taking care of him for a little while. He's my sister's little boy. She's ill and I'm taking care of him until she can get on her feet again. I'm just getting some mommy practice in case I can adopt a baby of my own!" Howard looked up and saw the neighbor from across the street looking down at him. When she squinted at him, studying his features and asked incredulously, "Are you SURE he's not your baby? He looks just like Howard!" Howard panicked. He could never explain how he came to be sitting in a high chair wearing nothing but a feeding bib and a diaper while eating a Happy Meal. He was caught! She knew who he was! Howard felt a warm sensation begin to flood his crotch. "Oh my God," Howard thought when he realized what he had done and involuntarily opened his mouth to let a piece of spit-covered hamburger fall out of his mouth onto the protective bib. He felt the chunk of meat hit the bib and looked down with horror at the damning evidence of his incompetence displayed on his bib for the world to see and thought, "She knows who I am. Look at me! I've dribbled food all over my bib and peed in my diaper right in front of her! I'll never live this down! We'll have to sell the house and move to another town!" "It looks like you'll get some practice sooner than you think! Have you looked at his dydee recently? It's positively soaked!", Susan said. "His diaper will keep until after we've eaten. There's no rush," Anita replied as she took a dainty bite from her burger. She saw that Howard had stopped eating and said to him in a motherly aside, "Eat your Happy Meal, Honeybunch. There's a good baby!" Howard reluctantly began chewing on his hamburger again although the sinking feeling of terror he had felt a few minutes before had considerably reduced his appetite. He thought he might as well finish his meal, things couldn't get much worse. "You're probably right," Susan admitted, "Babies are used to that sort of thing. Did I hear you right? Are you going to adopt a baby?" "I've given it serious consideration," Anita said, "Of course I don't want to adopt a toddler. A little one that age wonders where his mommy has gone and feels hurt that his mommy has abandoned him. Children like that often have adjustment problems in later life. I want to adopt a little baby who's so young that he'll think that I'm his real mommy." "What does Howard think of adopting?," Susan asked, "You've told me on several occasions that he's utterly opposed to adoption." Anita frowned and said, "Howard and I are separated. He left me the minute my sister's little boy came into the house." Susan smirked and said, "Afraid of the competition, huh? I'm not surprised! Most men are big babies at heart and don't want to share their wives with an interloper. I swear, sometimes I think the lot of them ought to be put back in diapers and treated the way they deserve! Most women are more mommies to their husbands than wives anyway. I don't know what it is about men that turns them into helpless infants the minute they get married! You'd think that they would've had enough mothering by the time they leave home. But no, the instant they get married, they try to turn their wives into mommies. Men like that need to be turned over their wives' knees and given a good spanking!" "There's that," Anita agreed noncommittally, "I doubt that Howard would put up with the kind of treatment you suggest unless he was ill and couldn't fight back. You know what a male chauvinist he is. But the point is moot now, he's no longer a member of my household. He had a midlife crisis and started going "out with the boys" to nudie bars. One thing led to another and he changed from a faithful husband into a little boy who couldn't control his urges. Howard is living with a woman who enjoys cleaning up the messes he makes and happily puts up with his infantile behavior. I can't say I'm not pleased with how things have turned out. As for Howard, he made his decision when he started seeing other women and now he's going to have to live with the consequences. As far as I'm concerned, I'm no longer married to him. He signed over his share of the community property to my name and went to live with the 'other woman'. Good riddance to him! In the meantime, I've got this little one to take care of for my sister. I'm not lonely." "Well, he's a cutiepie, whoever's child he is!", Susan remarked, "Although if he were my child, I'd have him out of diapers and into training pants by now. He's a little old for dydees, don't you think?" "He's a little slow. The doctor said...No, I shouldn't say anything about my sister's child. It's not for me to go around telling everyone her business," Anita lied glibly with a straight face. Susan's mouth formed a large "Oh" of understanding and she asked, "I get the picture! I noticed that he still needs a feeding bib. Can he talk yet?" "Not very much," Anita prevaricated, "But he's a very sweet baby!" "'Special' children are always so loving," Susan agreed, "My brother has a little one like him and he's simply adorable! The doctors say that his condition is permanent and he'll have to be cared for like an infant the rest of his life. Something to do with heavy metal poisoning or something. They said it was in the water they gave him from the water tap in the kitchen when he was a few months old. My brother and sister-in-law blame themselves for not keeping him strictly on canned formula until he was at least two. Everyone should know by now that giving tap water to infants is dangerous. It doesn't matter if it's boiled, tap water is simply too contaminated with pesticides, heavy metals and chemicals to give to infants. But my brother was in-between jobs and money was short, you know how it is. Anyway, they gave their little boy water in addition to his formula for four months starting when he was about two months old. That was all it took." Howard was furious with Anita. She had as much told Susan that he was mentally retarded. Granted, it was better than having her find out that he was a full grown man who was suffering from a terribly humiliating condition, but not by much. And where did she get that stuff about nudie bars? Had she been spying on him? What was all that about "seeing" other women? Had she made it up or did she know about his "extracurricular" activities? Had she found out about Barbie somehow? When she said "Good Riddance" she sounded like she was serious. What the Hell was going on here, anyway? McDonald's intercom called out an order number and Susan said, "That's my number, I've got to go. It's been nice talking to you. I'm sure everything will work out for you. I hope your sister is feeling better soon." Susan patted Howard on the head patronizingly and said, "It's been nice meeting you, Sweetie. I can't get over how much you look like Howard." She turned to Anita and said jokingly, "...You're SURE that Howard didn't make whoopie with your sister?" "My sister doesn't have the slightest interest in Howard. Believe me, she's not his type. It's just a coincidence that her baby looks like him to you. Frankly, I don't think he looks like Howard at all. He's much cuter than Howard," Anita replied dryly. "There's no doubt about that," Susan said with a knowing chuckle, "I know you didn't marry Howard for his looks. His face looks like ten miles of bad back-country road. I've got to go before my food gets cold! Take care of yourself, bye!" Anita glanced at Howard's diaper and saw that Susan had been right about it being soaked. The absorbent gel had expanded from the huge amount of urine it had soaked up, causing the crotch of his diaper to droop all the way down to the plastic seat of the high chair. There wasn't a mother in McDonalds that wouldn't have recognized that he was wet immediately. Anita could clearly see the dull yellow stain behind the obscuring translucent white plastic of the diaper's outer shell. She considered changing him in the Ladies' room, but she was afraid he'd put up a fuss. Besides, the diapers she'd bought for him were still in the car. Howard's diaper change could wait until they got home. He needed to get used to wearing wet diapers anyway and there wasn't any sense in making a special effort on his account. She was glad that she had put a disposable feeding bib on him. She hadn't really intended to use them so soon when she bought them, but her intuition told her to bring the package of bibs in the restaurant with them. Howard had made a mess of himself. His hands were covered in catsup and drips of the red sauce had mixed with his saliva and were running down his chin to fall onto his bib. The feeding bib was covered with little particles of food and pink and red splatters of catsup-colored drool. When she examined the bib more closely she saw a big chuck of meat that the bib had caught before landing on the floor. Clearly, Howard was going to need a feeding bib at all of his meals from that moment on. Anita smiled at the mess he had made and patted him on the head encouragingly so he would finish his meal. Sound planning and good management had prevented a social disaster at the restaurant and probably prevented him from making a mess in the Suburban later if she had had to take his messy body out to the van in the condition it was in. Fortunately, she had provided for this contingency as well. She reached in her purse and pulled out the thin travel container of wet wipes. She was going to have to start carrying a diaper bag to hold all of his supplies soon. She promised herself that on their next trip out of the house, she was going to pack a diaper bag that she could carry wherever they went. They finished their meal quickly and Anita began to clean Howard up. He was surprised to see how big a mess he had made while eating. Anita wiped his lips with the dirty bib and removed it from his neck to scrape most of the mess from his hands with the clean side of the bib. Then she folded the bib neatly and laid it inside of the discarded Happy Meal box. Once she had wiped him clean with one of the wet wipes from the little box, she threw away the remnants of their meal and carried him back to the van. When they got home, Anita got out of the Suburban and went to the back seat to carry him into the house. When she bent over to unfasten his seat belt, the smell of a dirty diaper rose up from him and assaulted her nostrils. She shook her head with a maternal expression of forbearance and looked at him more closely. Howard had shrunk radically during the short ride home. It was obvious that the process of regression had resumed. Poor little Howard l ooked like he couldn't have been more than two years old. The seat belt which she had snugged down to a tight fit over his tummy before the trip started lay uselessly across the crotch of his diaper and his diaper hung loosely about his waist, barely containing the both the mess that lay beneath his bottom and the pee he had voided at the restaurant. Anita unfastened the seat belt and carefully gathered him up in her arms to carry him into the house. She deposited him on the family room floor in his dirty diapers and said, "Honeybunch, Mommy has to go get the groceries out of the Suburban. Mommy wants you to stay right there while she's gone. If you move and make a mess on Mommy's clean rug, Mommy will spank! Do you understand?"
He nodded his understanding and she left him as he was on the floor while she went out to the van. Howard looked in wonder at the diaper which had been so tight earlier in the day. It was so loose that if had stood up, it would have immediately fallen off his tush. Howard played with his blocks until Anita finished putting up the groceries and came in the room. She looked at the pile of assorted toys that had been lying on the floor since Saturday and shook her head, saying, "I think your dirty dydees will keep for a little while. In the meantime, I think I should do something about this room. It's a mess. It looks like I'm going to have to go through your toys, Howie. Most of your toys weren't designed for babies. Oh well, I was tired of looking at the mess anyway. These toys have littered the floor for over a week!"
Anita went to the kitchen and returned with a large black plastic lawn and leaf bag. She began picking up his toys and putting them in the bag. When she was done, all that remained of his toys was a group of soft pushy stuffed animals, multicolored donut-shaped stacking rings and a set of pastel-colored nesting boxes. Anita left out the wheeled bubble push-toy that was mounted to a stick, but she propped the long handle against the wall where it would be out of the way. Howard frowned when he saw Anita stow his beloved blocks in the bag with the other toys. Apparently she thought that they were too dangerous for infant play. She dragged the bag out to the garage and returned with a large flat folded object which she laid on the floor next to Howard. When she unfolded it, Howard recognized what the thing was; a playpen! Anita picked up his remaining toys and threw them behind the wall of restraining mesh as Howard looked on in abject horror. "Surely she doesn't mean to put me in there!", he thought to himself.
His worst fears were realized when she lifted him under his armpits and lowered him into the playpen with his toys. He had been busted out of the ranks of men and demoted all the way down to infancy. Anita had used the excuse of his disability to downgrade him clear through boyhood to the lowest position possible in a family; the baby!
Howard wept silently for a time, then took up a stuffed toy and cuddled it tentatively to his side. He felt alone and abandoned in the playpen. The cold wet diaper and the slimy mess in which he sat was a constant reminder of his loss of status. There was nothing left in life for him. Everything that had made him a man was gone. He felt like all that was left of him was a shell of his former self. He bore a portion of his former name and nothing else. Anita was the boss now. She owned the house, the bank accounts and their stocks. He didn't even own the dirty disposable diaper that covered his bottom. Howard closed his eyes and tried to feel the condition of his bladder, but even that was denied him. Everything below his navel felt like it barely present. It was as if his bowels and bladder belonged to someone else. His penis was a hopeless proposition. True, a gentle massage still felt pleasurable, but the sensations weren't the same as they had been before his transformation. Masturbation wasn't the solitary adult recreation that he remembered. He had tried to jerk himself off in his training pants for two nights running, but the pleasant sensations his tiny erection had produced had only made him sleepy. His best efforts were only a pale promise of the pleasures that might have been had his body been sexually mature. Howard sighed and brought the stuffed animal up to his face to rub it across his cheek. It wasn't the same as running his lower jaw across Anita's velvety inner thighs when he used to make love to her, but there was something sensual and comforting about the feel of the fuzzy toy that made him feel better.
After a while he began playing with the ring toy that Anita had placed in the playpen. It wasn't that he found it particularly entertaining, but he remembered a mathematical problem he had read about in his college days. There was a long standing mathematical problem that tried to find the minimum number of moves to change the order of stacked rings from one pillar to another. Essentially, the problem involved inverting the sequence of rings on each pillar without taking more than one ring from a pillar at one time. Howard thought that he had read somewhere of a multi-million move solution that had been determined on a computer, but an intuitive solution had never been found. There was the barest chance that he might find the solution by inspection were others had failed. In any case, it was a way to pass his time. Howard began stacking and unstacking rings one by one, patiently enduring the boredom which threatened to dull his mind to the point of uselessness. He repeated each action over and over going through each motion automatically. Howard's consciousness contracted as the mind numbing repetition destroyed all semblance of independent thought. The fetid pain of his wounded mind seeped away to be absorbed like the overflow from a septic tank in a verdant drain field. He was in a perfect state of Zen, mindless, wordless, and egoless. When Anita finally came back to change his dirty diaper, he was little more than a self-actuated protean automaton which mindlessly continued its program until some outside agency forced it to halt. Anita came into the room carrying a small white box and what appeared to be a folded white dish towel. She took him out of the playpen, sat him on the floor, then put her hand on his chest and forced him to lay back on the carpet. Anita unfastened the tapes of his diaper wordlessly and drew the soggy front down between his legs to lay on the carpet. She lifted his legs and made a preliminary wipe with the cold wet front on the diaper before sliding the clean disposable under his bottom she had brought from the kitchen under his bottom. After putting the dirty diaper aside, she cleansed his bottom with one of the wet wipes from the plastic box she had brought. Hoard ignored her ministrations and let her do her work unimpeded. Instead of putting him in a clean pair of training pants as he'd hoped, she dropped his legs to the carpet and quickly but firmly taped the clean disposable diaper around his waist. When he saw what she'd done, Howard was incensed. He was so angry he couldn't talk. Howard screamed an incoherent curse toward his wife and beat his fists on the rug beside him in a perfect imitation of a two-year-old's tantrum. Anita stood over him and watched calmly as he lay supine on the floor, drumming his heels and screaming in inarticulate fury. She noticed that his excitement appeared to be accelerating his regression. His body became smaller with every thud of his heels. She smiled grimly when she saw huge flakes of skin drop off of his legs as he beat his feet on the floor. She'd have to vacuum the carpet later, she decided. When she had had enough, Anita bent over and flipped him over on his belly. Then she picked up his wildly thrashing body from behind with the ease of an experienced mother and carried him to the sofa. She sat him on her lap and said, "That's enough, Baby! One more word out of you and I'll put you over my knee and blister your bottom! Do you understand me?" Howard ignored her threat and began screaming poorly enunciated profanity up towards her. When Anita seized his hands in one of hers in an attempt to reason with him, he reacted by trying to bite her arm. Immediately, she pulled him down to lay on her lap and held him in position with one hand while Howard continued to kick and scream. Howard's thrashing was counterproductive though, the movement made his diapers fall halfway down his buttocks without needing to be pulled down by his wife. Anita raised her hand and proceeded to beat his bare bottom until it turned cherry red. Howard's expression changed from unrestrained fury to one of complete surprise. She was spanking him like a baby! The pain quickly cut through his emotion clouded mind and filled it with agony; his rejuvenation had given his skin the sensitivity of an infant. His angry curses died on his lips and became screams of anguished pain. "This can't be happening to me!", Howard thought to himself wildly as his punishment continued, "I'm the man of the house. I wear the pants here! She can't spank me!" The combination of pain, helplessness and humiliation was too much for Howard. All he wanted to do was escape the torturous pain that threatened to overwhelm his mind. He begged her stop but the spanking went on and on. Anita was determined to break his rebellious behavior once and for all. Gradually his yells of pain changed into broken sobs punctuated by the gasped whimpers of a very young child. Howard's will broke and he lay limply on her lap, his entire body shuddering with every slap on his crimson bottom. Howard raised his head in hope when Anita paused and said, "Have you had enough, Baby? If you're going to throw temper tantrums like a two-year-old, Mommy is going to treat you like one! Look at you! You poop in your dydees and you have the temerity to throw a temper tantrum when Mommy changes you. I think we should drop this pretense of thinking you can ever be a man again. You don't even have the maturity of a preschooler! I've seen two-year-olds that have better potty training than you have. Most of them can hold their poop until they sit on the pot. As far as I can see, you're only a thumb-sucking, diaper-messing infant! From now on, you're going to be my baby! Do you understand? I'm going to tell the Daycare's manager to move you into the nursery permanently. You won't have to worry about messing in your training pants any more, Howie. I'll see that you're safety dressed in diapers morning, noon and night. Now then, I think I deserve an apology for your naughtiness, don't you?" Howard knew that she was serious about making him her baby. He lowered his head to her legs and whimpered at the news of his loss of adult standing. Anita smiled at his posture; his submissive body language meant that he had accepted defeat. "Well?", Anita asked. Howard raised his head from her lap and said tearfully, "Me sorry!" Anita patted his head solicitously and said, "Mommy forgives you, Sweetheart. Who could stay mad at a baby who's as cute as you are?" She tugged his diaper up to cover the angry skin of his reddened bottom and laid him on the floor while she went into the kitchen. Howard heard Anita's voice floating out of the kitchen as she spoke on the phone in barely discernable tones. Whispers of some disconnected words of Anita's conversation made their way to his ears. Her conversation seemed to primarily concern him, but he couldn't be sure she was giving the same line that she had told Susan at the restaurant and was embellishing the tale with the latest exploits of the toddler she was babysitting. Whatever she was saying, it was too much for comfort! Howard heard, "Howard's gone...baby in the house now...sold my car...got enough money to pay for the nursery furniture I bought...sent the furniture company a check the other day and paid it all off... I'm driving Howard's Suburban now...saw our next door neighbor Susan this afternoon ... he peed himself right in front of her...you should have seen the adorable look of panic on his face when he realized what he'd done...thought he looked like Howard...ridiculous to assume just because he looks like....should have seen the mess he made of himself at the restaurant...something told me to buy disposable bibs for going out to eat when we were at the grocery store...glad I did....bib was a lifesaver...from now on, he's wearing a bib when he eats...not sure, but he looks like he's about eighteen...Howard...poopy diaper...got his nursery ready for him a few minutes ago...it looks adorable....going to throw away his training pants, he sure won't be needing them now...tried to bite me....paddled his fanny...positive...making the adjustment... promotion guaranteed...won't be too long now...a month from the lab reports you showed me...agree with you...okay with me no matter what happens...no legal issues...no, Howard signed everything over to me...bastard...deserves it...always wanted to have a baby...better than adoption ...finally...one of my own...we're all going to be rich...love you too...bye!" Howard thought angrily, "If she's talking about me, then who the Hell is she talking to? I thought my condition was supposed to be a secret! Didn't she tell me that we could tell anyone or she'd lose her job? If she isn't, what the Hell is she talking about? Just what the Hell is she up to anyway?" After her phone call, Anita returned and put him back in his playpen to amuse himself with his toys while she did some work in the bedroom. He tried to stand to watch her leave but discovered that the mesh walls of the playpen would give him no purchase to pull himself erect. He was forced to creep on all fours to the other end of the playpen so he could see her leave the room. Howard crept over to his toys and played with them in a dilatory fashion for a few minutes before his hyperactive bladder betrayed him again. Without notice, the front of his diaper became warm and began to sag under the weight of his pee as he knelt in the playpen on his hands and knees. When Anita was done in Howard's bedroom, she returned to find him sitting in the playpen with a dazed expression on his face. His legs were splayed out wide in front of him on the plastic pad and he was fingering the bulge in his diapers in confusion after wetting them. When he noticed her standing behind him, he gazed up at her with a helpless pleading look. She picked him up from the playpen and held him to her breasts to comfort him while she patted him on his diapered bottom. Anita could feel him shrinking in her arms. Within minutes his size decreased until he resembled a one-year-old. Anita smiled and nodded understandingly when she saw how little he had become in the few minutes since she had left. Six-inch patches of dead skin peeled from his body and fluttered to the floor like colorless, translucent leaves as he desquamated his discarded scurf en masse. His blank expression left no doubt in her mind that he was having trouble comprehending was happening to him. She smiled warmly and stroked his hair while she hugged her new baby tightly to her bosom. As she fondled his hair, tufts of hair came free in her hand. His hair was thinning to an infant's sparseness while she watched. Howard's confused state prevented him from thinking about her remark when she mused to herself quietly, "Just look at the way he's shedding. He needs to be brushed before he gets hair everywhere. They didn't tell me that his final changes would take place so quickly. I guess it's time to get his bed ready for his nap." Anita gently sat him back on the pad of the playpen and handed him a stuffed toy to play with while she got the bathroom ready for his bath. She returned a few minutes later and took him to the bathroom for his bath. His mind seemed to clear somewhat and he thought about what she had said before she put him in the playpen. Everything seemed so confusing to him. She seemed to be his mother, but he had memories of her being his wife in a dimly remembered previous existence. "Who had she been talking about?", Howard asked himself while she carried him down the hall, "Who are the 'They' she was talking about?". When she stopped in front of the counter-to-ceiling bathroom mirror to pick up the baby's hair brush lying next to the basin, Howard got his first glimpse of what he had become. Anita's arms held an adorable baby boy with curly light brown hair and big blue eyes. The baby appeared to be a little less than a year old. He noticed that the crotch of the disposable diapers the baby was wearing had a large yellowish stain beneath the translucent white plastic covering. Anita gave his head a quick once over with the brush then stopped to pull the thick wad of hair that had accumulated in the brush. She brushed out his hair again causing a shower of freed hair to fall from his head and land on his chest and shoulders. Anita cleaned the brush again and brushed his hair a final time. Howard looked in the mirror and saw that his hair had thinned considerably. Most of his hair lay on the counter where Anita had cleaned the brush. The sparse wisps of hair that remained on his scalp emphasized the look of extreme youth of the baby in the mirror. After his scalp had been stripped of its loose hair, he looked like he couldn't be more than ten months old. The shock of his appearance cleared his mind and he thought as she picked up the wad of hair, tossed it in the open toilet and turned on the tub, "No wonder Anita's treating me like an infant! Not only do I pee and mess in my diapers like a baby, I look like one!" Anita stripped off the wet diaper and bathed him gently in the tub. Howard was stunned to see that every time she rinsed the washcloth she was using to bathe him, dense white clouds of dead skin eddied from the fabric into the bathwater. Within minutes the small white flakes of skin had changed the clear bathwater into a milky solution. Howard saw that the surface of the water was covered with a thick layer of swirling dandruff that Anita had scrubbed from his body. He looked down at his tummy and saw that his epidermis had acquired the fresh, pink, wrinkled look of a newborn's skin. When Anita had finished scrubbing the sloughed particles of skin from his body, she took him out and briskly rubbed him dry with a huge bath towel. She wrapped him in the towel and carried him to the spare room. As Anita opened the door to the room, Howard was horrified to see that she had mounted rails on either side of his mattress. On the side of the door, he noticed that a baby gate had been added to the door post of his nursery so that he could be allowed to roam freely on his hands and knees while confined to the boundaries of his room. His stylish youth bed had been transformed in a single afternoon into a handsome walnut crib complete with a wind-up mobile of baby bunnies that hung over the head of the crib. The Winnie the Poo comforter was still there, but was now draped over the end of the white-sheeted crib. His pillow however had vanished into whatever storage place women had to hide things from their men. She had even changed the window treatment from the age-neutral, tawny, heavy-threaded weave which had graced the room earlier that morning to curtains with a decidedly babyish motif. He gaped in horror at the curtain's fine colored drawings of diapered baby boys gamboling and creeping amidst a profusion of baby blocks, rattles, pacifiers and nippled bottles on a powder blue background. Everywhere he looked, Howard saw that his bedroom had been not-so-subtly transmogrified into an infant's nursery. He shivered when he saw the huge oak rocker that now occupied the corner of the room with a baby blue receiving blanket draped neatly over the back. He had a feeling that Anita would soon be using it to rock him to sleep at night in her arms. She had accented the light blue-white of the walls by a waist-high (for Anita) six-inch tall strip of storks on a white field carrying blue-swathed baby bundles in their long yellow beaks with rows repeating of blue outlined baby bottles bordering the top and bottom of the decorative strip. She had even managed to change the slightly childish appliques of brightly colored balloons into a damnably infantine theme by the simple addition of cut-outs of diapered teddy bears with their arms upraised underneath the balloons. Now the balloons had the appearance of being held by infant teddy bears. Howard sniffed in disgust and realized that she had somehow managed to change how the room smelled. The faintly disagreeable odor of latex paint had dissipated. Instead of the strong neutral smell of freshly washed be dlinen mixed with the almost imperceptible odor of new paint the room had had in the morning when he woke up, the room now fairly reeked with the sweet scent of baby powder. Suddenly the room's appearance took on ominous implications. The muted clacking sounds that Anita's low heels made as they hit the hard wooden floor while she carried him into the nursery reminded Howard why areas that babies played in frequently weren't carpeted. She had removed the carpet and exposed the parquet flooring because a baby could be expected to make messes on floors. All it took to clean baby poop from a wooden floor was a quick swipe with a mop drenched in disinfectant. She wouldn't have to drag out the carpet cleaner each time he made a mess on the floor. Baby spit, poop and pee were too difficult to clean from carpets to not take reasonable precautions. She had planned this all along! It wasn't any accident that she had bought furniture that could be so easily changed into nursery furnishings. She had purchased the decorations long before he had made the final transformation into an infant's body. She had set out from the very beginning to buy furnishings suitable for a baby. The training pants and the Daycare Center were all part of a complex design to ensnare him into accepting the life of a small child. From what he could see, the changes she had introduced in his life were only the intermediate stage in her plans. Anita had intended to set up a baby nursery for him all along! The furniture she had bought hadn't been intended for a child as he had originally thought, but had been designed for an infant's use instead. No wonder the armoire was so small! Howard glanced at the armoire and saw that the small door was still ajar. He could see a tiny rack of gaily colored garb hanging inside waiting for his use. He knew the clothes must be several sizes smaller than the clothes that had populated it before, because the feet of the miniature sleepers he glimpsed between the crack between the door and the armoire's frame barely touched its floor. The peek that he had of several onsies hanging from the rack told him that she expected him to remain the size of a baby for a long time. She hadn't bought that many clothes of the same size when he was still regressing through his youth. Obviously Anita had been fully prepared for him to shrink to the size of a baby and had bought a complete layette in anticipation of his regression into infancy. Howard noticed that a baby scale now stood on top of the armoire. Logic told him that she must have known he was going to regress to the size of an infant, otherwise, why would she have purchased a set of baby scales weeks before? When he looked at the dresser he saw that the top of the dresser had been fitted with an inch-thick, white-plastic covered pad. Behind the second railing at the back of the dresser sat a tall white plastic economy-sized bottle of baby power, a large blue tub of baby wipes, a huge jar of vaseline plainly labeled for nursery use, and five to six disposable diapers wedged between the two railings. The purpose of the dresser's odd construction was transparent; it was meant to be a baby's diaper changing station. Anita's strategy was crystalline clear. She had known, had expected, him to become an infant! No wonder she had tried to dissuade him from going to a doctor! She had wanted a baby and he had refused her one. Now HE was going to be her baby! But the question plagued him, "How could she have known?" His chemical accidents had been serendipitous, she couldn't have possibly known what the eventual outcome could be, could she? Even had she known, why hadn't she rushed him to a hospital? Did her drive to be a mother unhinge her mind or had she just been planning ahead, as was her usual wont? If she wasn't insane, why was she willing to give up a husband in exchange for a helpless baby? How could she expect to support the both of them on her income alone? Granted, she seemed to be enjoying his rejuvenation, but maybe that was her maternal instincts kicking in. There were far too many unanswered questions for him to form any kind of rational conclusion. Was he being paranoid or was there some darker plan Anita had in motion that had not yet materialized? After laying Howard on the changing table, Anita put a clean diaper under his bottom and fastened the diapers on his shrunken frame. Anita picked up a small pair of baby nail clippers and went to work on his bath-softened nails. Howard caught a glimpse of the hand she was working on a saw that his nails seemed to have grown to enormous length in the past hour. Actually his nails hadn't grown at all; his fingers had gotten smaller and retracted back from his fingernails while the dead tissue of his nails had remained the same size. Once she had finished with his fingers, she lifted a foot and started working on his toes. Howard tried to apologize for his behavior again, saying in a sorrowful tone, "Me sowwy me bad, Mama." To his horror, Howard realized that he had lost the ability to make "R" sounds. His babytalk was no longer a pretence! He could only talk like a baby! Instead of being an unwilling participant in the self-serving fraud she had managed to inveigle him into playing, he had become honestly speech-impaired. His deteriorating control over his muscles made him completely unable to manage the consonant sounds of adult speech. While she diapered him he experimented with random noises and discovered that he no longer had the ability to make the "L" and "Th" sounds either. The best he could manage was to substitute the "W" sound instead. It gave him a pronounced lisp and made him sound like a baby who had just learned to talk. He no longer had to pretend to talk like a baby, he couldn't have talked like an adult if he had wanted to!
She carried him to the kitchen and prepared a bottle of formula for him while he rode on her hip. Once the bottle was warmed, Anita carried him back to the nursery and sat down with him in the rocking chair she had bought. She laid him on his back and proceeded to feed him the formula from the bottle. Howard tried to resist, but the minute the nipple was in his mouth, his infantilized reflexes caused him to begin to suckle. Howard wondered what kind of formula it was, the milk was much thinner than cow's milk but it had a richer sweeter taste. He decided that she must be feeding him goat's milk, he had read a description of its flavor that was similar to how the formula tasted. After he finished the bottle, Anita laid a cloth diaper over her shoulder and turned him so that he faced her. Then she held him close to her and began to pat his back gently to bubble him. Instead of the belching, Howard's reflexes became confused and the pressure of the air in his stomach made him regurgitate a mouthful of formula. Howard tried to stop himself, but the thin milk flowed out of his lips so quickly that there was no time for him to reassert control of his mouth and swallow it again. The formula poured from his mouth and ran down his chin to soak the cloth diaper that Anita had placed there for just that eventuality. While Howard was spitting up, Anita kept patting him on the back, apparently unaware that he had vomited on her shoulder. A moment later, he loosed a huge belch and was taken from her shoulder to lie in her arms again. When Anita took the diaper from her shoulder and saw the large circle of frothy, half-digested formula on the white cloth, she smiled and shook her head in motherly forbearance as she carefully folded the mess inside the cloth and put it aside. After cuddling Howard for a time, she got up with him in her arms. Then she carried him to his crib and tucked him in for the afternoon. He fell asleep with a stuffed teddy bear in his arms.
After an hour, Howard awoke from his nap. He blinked his eyes rapidly to assure himself that he wasn't dreaming and slowly got to his knees on the crib mattress. His legs felt so weak he wasn't sure he could stand by himself so he crawled over to the side of the crib. Once he was at the side of the crib, he used the crib railings to pull himself to a standing position so that he could take a look at himself. It wasn't easy to see his diaper from a standing position; his stomach had enlarged and hung over his crotch, obscuring the view. The thick nighttime diaper between his legs made it difficult to stand and forced him to hang onto the rails tightly to keep his balance. His squeezed his legs together experimentally and discovered that it wasn't just the thickness of the diaper's padding that kept his legs apart, but his knees seemed to have rotated outwards. He couldn't bring his knees together no matter how hard he tried. His anatomy had changed so that his legs were no longer parallel! It was only then that he realized that the diaper hadn't bunched between his legs the way it had earlier that day. His legs had rotated so far apart in the hip sockets that they barely touched the diaper. It wasn't the diaper that made it difficult to stand straight. The anatomy of his legs had become bowlegged! Suddenly, Howard was seized by an overpowering need to evacuate his bowels. He tried to control himself, but the pressure on his weakened sphincter was more than he could hold back. As his control gave way to the inevitable, he felt himself emptying his bowels helplessly into the diaper. A warm feeling of relief spread upwards from his gut, accompanied by a series of excruciatingly pleasurable sensations as the soft stools passed through his lower bowel and dropped heavily into the rear of his diaper. Howard could feel the diaper jerk slightly and grow heavier as each load fell from his bottom and hit with an almost soundless plop on the growing pile that he was making between his legs. Howard's conscious mind was mortified by how infantile he was acting, but the physical gratification of letting go was too irresistible to forgo. He hated himself for what he was doing; it wasn't a small, explainable accident like he made in his training pants that morning, but a full fledged diaper defecation. He was filling the back of his diaper with an enormous load of poop. He looked down at the diaper he was wearing and discovered that the front of his diaper was completely soaked. Howard realized that had peed in his diaper while he was pooping and had never been aware of the sensation of urinating. He gazed down in horrified fascination and saw that his diaper bulged in front with the miniature erection that his illicit pleasure had evoked. Not only had he enjoyed shitting his pants like an infant, but the act of pooping in his pants had made him horny!
Howard wanted to cry. For the first time, Howard became aware of the changes in his behavior that had accompanied his rejuvenation into infancy. He didn't just look like an infant, he had become one! It was all Anita's fault! If she hadn't treated him like an infant, he could have controlled himself. She was the cause of all his woes! She was the one who had prevented him from going to a doctor for treatment! If his rejuvenation continued, he'd be little more than a baby in a day or two. He had to escape and get medical treatment before it was too late! Howard panicked, he had to get away from Anita and get to a hospital! Anything, even prison, was better than what he was becoming. He looked for a way to get out of the crib, but despite his adult intellect he couldn't find a way out. Howard's small size and growing weakness made it impossible for him to climb over the railings to escape the crib. Howard became hysterical and tried to run to the end of the crib closest to the bedroom door so he could call to Anita to get him out of the hellish place. On the way, his toes caught a fold in the sheet and he fell, twisting in the air to land flat in the mess contained in his diaper. Howard's eyes sprang wide open as he felt the pressure of his fall make the foul ooze in the back of his diaper squish up between his legs into his crotch. A warm trickle started running down the insides of his legs and pooled in the mess in which he sat as his bladder emptied itself again. Howard tried to sit up and the pressure on his abdomen made the trickle from his wee-wee turn into a hot torrent that soaked his behind. Howard was beside himself. He had to get away! He tried to stand up and managed to get himself erect before he fell back into the muck of his diaper. Howard's legs had become to weak to bear his weight and he had become to young to walk.
Weeping in frustration, he called out Anita's name to get her to come change him and discovered that his lisp had become so bad he was almost incomprehensible. He sat stunned by the revelation. If the rejuvenation continued he wouldn't even be able to talk. Howard essayed a small sound to test his vocal control and felt a sore spot in the way of his tongue. He put his forefinger in his mouth to palpate the irritation and felt a sore incisor on his upper gum that ached slightly to the touch. As he fingered his upper dentition, the half emerged tooth was sucked back through the gum line to disappear forever. "Oh, my God!," he thought to himself, "It's still happening!"
He put his finger back into his mouth to search for more sore teeth, but soon discovered that they had nearly all been absorbed by his youthening body. He could only count two lower incisors in his mouth with his finger. Howard whimpered when he realized that he was almost completely toothless. Anita came in response to his call and stood over the crib, asking, "What's wrong, Honeybunch? What's the matter with my baby boy?"
Anita smiled involuntarily at how infantile her former husband looked; he was sitting tearfully in the crib in obviously soaking diapers with his forefinger in his mouth like a eight month old infant. The reek of dirty diapers emanated from his behind and filled the nursery with the smell of baby poop.
Howard looked up at her tearfully and began to explain his predicament as rapidly as possible, forgetting that his finger was still in his mouth. It was several seconds before he realized that all that was coming out of his mouth was unintelligible gibberish. He hastily withdrew his finger, blushing in embarrassment at the being caught like an infant with his finger in his mouth. Howard grew silent for a moment to collect his thoughts and blushed again when he realized the confession he had to make to his wife. Howard stumbled a halting, lisped explanation in babytalk of what he had done and was relieved when she nodded sympathetically instead of criticizing his infantile behavior. She reached over the rails, not bothering to drop the side to pick up his body. Howard was mortified when she carried him over to the changing station and said as she untapped his diaper, "Is my little baby boy messy? Did hims make a poopy in hims dydee? Poor baby! Don't cry, Sweetheart! Mommy will get you cleaned up and into a nice dry diaper in a minute. Ohhh, baby must like making a mess in hims dydee! Little Howie has a little baby hard-on. Don't squirm, Honeybunch! Mommy has to get all this nasty poopy off your bottom! There you go, Sweetiepie! Your little hiney is nice and clean. Let's get some vaseline on your poor little tush so Mommy's baby won't get dydee rash."
Howard closed his eyes in humiliation as Anita lifted his legs and worked a huge dollop of vaseline between his cheeks. The worse part wasn't that she was treating him like a baby, but that he was actually enjoying the sensations of having her rub the sticky lubricant into his most private place. When he opened his eyes to see his crotch still being held aloft by his feet, he saw that his tiny erection had become even bigger. Was there no end to his ignominy?
Howard was answered when she said as she lowered his bottom to the clean diaper and began pulling its thick padding up between his legs, "There now, Sweetheart. Isn't that better? Now let Mommy get you tucked into a nice fluffy dydee!"
Tears ran down the sides of Howard's face as she finished taping the sides of his diaper in place and said, "There you go! All snug as a bug in a rug. Nap time is over, Sweetheart. Don't cry, Honeybunch! Poor Dear, you must be hungry after your nap. Come on, Sweetie. Mommy will take you to the kitchen and get you some din-din."
Howard laid his head on her shoulder and wept in despair as she carried him to the kitchen. Howard roused from his overwrought state to discover that Anita had strapped him in a high chair. The chair was covered with a plastic covered padding which reduced the leeway between his hips and the high chair to nearly zero. The chair's safety strap was threaded through the space between legs and put pressure on the thick absorbent padding of his diaper. He could feel the folds of his diaper being pushed back into his testicles, making him constantly aware that the only thing he was wearing was an infant's diaper. Every time he moved his legs, he could hear the crinkling of the protective plastic cover on his diaper. The worst part was a general feeling of not "being there". It was as if his bladder and bowels had given up on trying to hold back and had taken a permanent vacation from work. They weren't even sending signals back to message their presence. The fact that he couldn't see his crotch under the tray of the high chair only intensified the feeling he had of having lost complete control of his bladder and bowels. He was only a spectator in his body. Howard felt like his peeing and pooping had become Anita's responsibility rather than his. He squirmed in the high chair and became suddenly aware that his little wee-wee was fully erect under the diaper. The diaper's padding was stimulating the glans of his penis. Howard blushed when he realized that his helplessness was making him horny! His subconscious was enjoying being a baby!
Anita's back was turned to him as she prepared his dinner on the stove. Howard looked down and saw that she had already put a baby's feeding bib around his neck. The tray was flush with his protuberant baby tummy. He tried to bend over to pull himself up and out of the chair through the top and discovered that the tray only let him a few degrees forward. Howard thought about it for a moment and decided that if he couldn't go up, he might be able to go in the other direction. He extended his legs to make them as level as possible, then tried to worm his way further into the chair to slip under the tray. He managed to move about two inches and felt something pushing back on his crotch like a restraining hand. The harder he pushed, the stronger the pressure on his crotch. Howard pushed one last time in desperation but was held fast in the chair. If his testicles hadn't been the size of sweetpeas, he would have crushed them against the safety strap in his attempt to escape. Howard slumped over in the high chair in defeat. He couldn't move in any direction; he was trapped in the chair. Howard beat his bare heels against the foot rest in frustration only to find that the plastic padding extended well below his feet. The overly padded high chair wouldn't permit him the luxury of hurting himself.
Anita turned off the stove and left the pot on the burner to keep warm. Then she pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down in front of him with a jar of baby food in her hand. All the color drained out of Howard's face when he saw her unscrew the lid and ladle out a heaping helping on the rubber covered feeding spoon. "No! No Mama! Pwees no!", he screamed in desperation as the spoon full of textureless green substance neared his face. He struggled to get out of the high chair, but the combination of the tray and safety straps held him securely bound into the infant seat.
"Be a good boy, Howie and eat your din-din!", Anita cajoled.
"No!", Howard replied petulantly.
"Eat it, Howie!", Anita said firmly, "Or Mommy will spank!"
"No!", Howard said clenching his jaw in defiance.
Anita smiled evilly and put the jar on the table. Then she held the spoon out in front of him with one hand, while she reached down to the foot rest with the other. "Mommy can make you open your mouth, Howie. Are you sure you want to do disobey me?"
Howard stared back at her obstinately without saying a word. Anita nodded to herself as if signaling that she had made up her mind to show him who was boss and began to tickle his bare feet. Howard managed to maintain his stern expression about five minutes before he cracked and began giggling uncontrollably. Anita continued to tickle him until he was convulsed with open-mouthed breathless laughter. Then suddenly, like a venomous snake striking, the spoon darted forward and deposited its pureed load of vegetable muck into his gaping mouth. Anita smiled and said, "I can tickle you until you're too exhausted to resist. Is that what you want, Howie? Or would you rather I put you over my knee and spank you until you can't sit for a week? Either way, Baby, you're going to eat your dinner!"
Howard swallowed the disgusting pap and opened his mouth submissively for another spoonful. He couldn't fight her in his present condition, he knew. Resistance was futile when your only weapon was an infant's body. Howard let her feed him the rest of the jar and sat still while she wiped the drips of puree from his face with a damp terry cloth kitchen towel. His bib was a mess, he seemed to have gotten as much food on the bib as in him. Anita cleaned his messy fingers with the towel and went to the stove to get him the rest of his dinner. Just before she served him the formula she had been warming on the stove, she decided to make an addition to his milk. Anita opened the cabinet over the kitchen counter were she stored medications. She took down a small bottle and unscrewed the cap from the baby bottle. Then she uncapped the bottle of medication and added the contents of two full eyedroppers to Howard's formula before recapping the bottles. It wouldn't be necessary to doctor his formula with diuretics like she had his oatmeal that morning, she didn't want him to get dehydrated. His bladder control had become virtually nonexistent anyway. The oatmeal had done its job well; the taste of the oatmeal and cinnamon had covered the two medications and the daily dose of fiber had made his bowel movements regular as she had planned. She brought the baby bottle to Howard and said, "Drink your formula, Sweetheart, and then you can play before you have to go nite-nite!"
Howard drank the sweet formula with a woeful expression of distaste on his face. The formula had acquired a decided chemical aftertaste that he hated. It was the same milk he had had earlier that day but something had been added to ruin its wonderful flavor. After he had drunk half of it, Anita burped him and said, "That's a good baby! You can finish the rest of your bottle while Mommy gets something to eat."
Howard watched in fascination while she made a quick meal of Fettuccine Alfredo and sat down to eat it in front of him at the kitchen table. The chemical aftertaste made the formula nauseating. He had to summon every ounce of his will to force down a mouthful of the vile concoction. The worst part was looking at the creamy noodles which Anita was devouring with evident relish. The Parmesan cheese had blended perfectly with the sweet butter and formed a thick white coating over each noodle. Howard would have given anything for just one spoonful of Anita's meal. Howard felt a pain in the top of his stomach as he swallowed the mouthful of formula. He had inadvertently swallowed some air with the formula. Howard sucked again on the nipple to get another mouthful to wash down the bubble of air. As he did, a tiny rivelet of spit ran from the corner of his mouth and gathered with another on his chin. He took the nipple from his mouth and gulped down the formula, staring at the noodles on Anita's plate.
Anita looked up from her meal and smiled at the expression of intense desire on his face. Howard knew that she was eating in front of him just to see him drool over watching her eat real food while he was forced to drink the vile tasting infant formula from a baby bottle. There was no question in Howard's mind that she was enjoying his discomfiture. Howard couldn't imagine what had happened to Anita to change her attitude in the past week. The rationale she had given him for forcing him into daycare was reasonable enough, but her overall opinion of him seemed to have changed. She seemed to be bent on humiliating him at every opportunity. Anita seemed to be enjoying the loss of his manhood and delighted in his transformation into an infant. Howard had a bad feeling that her actions were all part of some hidden agenda. Her behavior was just too ingratiating and maternal to be real!
Anita finished her meal just as Howard sucked the last drop of formula from his bottle. She put her plate in the kitchen and returned to stand beside the high chair. She took the bottle from his hand and placed it upright on the table as she looked at the sour look on his face and said, "Does baby have a bubble?"
Howard looked up at her helplessly, feeling as if he was going to toss his cookies at any moment. Without waiting for his reply, she began patting him gently on the back. A minute later, he belched loudly as the air trapped in his stomach was released.
Anita smiled and stooped over to release the catch on the tray, then removed it from the chair. She put her left hand on his stomach to hold him in the chair and bent him over at the waist with her other hand so she could unfasten the belt that was buckled behind his back. When the ends of the belt were free, she pushed him back in the chair and pulled the strap down between his legs. Howard grimaced when he saw the strap that had secured him in the chair. He hadn't noticed her fastening the belt around his waist when she put him in the high chair. No wonder he couldn't get out of the chair without her help!
Anita lifted him out of the chair and carried him to the family room. Instead of putting him in the playpen as he expected, Anita put him on the floor at her feet while she sat on the couch. Howard crawled around the floor for a few minutes before the second dose of Colace Anita had spiked his baby formula with hit him. She had put the first two hundred milligram dose in his oatmeal that morning to make sure that the high fiber diet she had put him on was not going to give him constipation. It had done its job well. He had not been able to control his bowels at the Daycare center that morning and had spent the day pooping in his dydees like an infant. Once the second dose took effect, Anita knew he would probably poop in his sleep. Within a week, his toilet training would be completely gone and diapers would be a necessity for him rather than a convenience for the Center.
Anita smiled as she saw a strange expression come over him as he crouched at her feet. He froze in position on the floor on all fours with a silly grin of embarrassment on his face as his bowels loosed themselves again. This time, however, she knew his stools wouldn't have any hardness to them at all. He would be filling his diaper uncontrollably with the pudding-like poop of early infancy. It would be days before the first day's four hundred milligram dose of Colace wore off. Of course the diet of purrrd vegetables and fruits hadn't helped make his stools any firmer. Anita decided that she would taper the dosage down to three hundred milligrams on the second day, two hundred milligrams the third day and ending with one hundred milligrams on the forth and fifth days. By that time, his muscles would have lost their tonus and he would be too uncontrolled to even think about using a toilet to relieve himself. He was too small to sit on a toddler's potty chair in any case. Diapers were the only appropriate venue for his poop now. Once she had removed all the meats from his diet and put him on a strict regimen of vegetables and fruit, his stools would be so soft that laxatives would be unnecessary. The baby formula and food would keep him as regular and uncontrolled as the merest infant and he would slip into diaper dependency without a whimper of realization of what had happened. The women at the daycare would inevitably treat him like the infant he had become.
Howard suddenly woke from his daze and turned his head up to see Anita smiling at what he had done. All the elements fell into place for Howard. He wasn't a man! He was a baby! Only babies crawl on the floor on their hands and knees and poop in their dydees! He compared his hand to her foot and saw the vast disparity between their sizes. Her knees loomed over him like the pillars of a tall building. Her ankles were just below his eye height. When he looked up at her smiling face so looked like she was hundreds of feet away. Her shoes were the only things about her that were lower than him. He reached out with his hand to touch the point of her shoe and saw that it now dwarfed his hand. He was tiny compared to her huge body! He felt small and insignificant in the presence of Anita. Howard glanced back up at her timidly and was awed by how her appearance had changed. She didn't look like the cowed, spineless woman he had married. She looked so confident and sure of herself. The sound of her voice radiated a sense of direction and conviction every time she spoke. How could he have ever thought that he was good enough to give her orders? He was only an irrelevant nothing compared to the Goddess who sat enthroned in front of him. Howard felt as if his ego was dwindling to match his size. Howard did the only rational thing he could under the circumstances; he began to cry!
Anita listened to the keening wail of the infant at her feet with a sense of satisfaction. Howard hadn't even tried to tell her that he had messed in his diapers. He had merely screwed up his face and began crying like an infant. She wouldn't have any more trouble with him. Anita let him cry a little more and then picked him up and carried him to the nursery. He never noticed when she put him on the changing table and cleaned his bottom. Howard continued to cry miserably until Anita bent down and put her lips to the baby soft skin of his tummy. Then she blew a labial fricative on stomach. Howard giggled in response. She blew again and was please to see that he was enjoying her attentions. He calmed down and let her unfasten his diaper without rancor, then giggled as she wiped his messy bottom and laid him back on a clean diaper. Anita gently spread a protective layer of petroleum jelly on his bottom, then held up his tiny genitals to coat them as well. Howard didn't know what to make of the sensations he was feeling. He laid on the changing pad looking up at Anita helplessly while she smiled with ingratiating amusement and manipulated him between her greased fingers. A funny feeling ran up his spine from the area of his crotch as she worked the lubricant into the skin of his penis. A sense of urgency struck Howard as if he was going to orgasm any moment. He kicked his legs in nervous excitement and rocked his pelvis on the pad. All it would take is a few seconds more of stimulation and he would explode! Anita patted him condescendingly on his leg and turned away for a moment to get the baby powder. She turned back to him and sprinkled the sweet smelling power all over his crotch, then set the bottle down and took the soles of his feet in either hand. She playfully spread his legs and lifted them high in the air until his bottom was completely free of the changing pad. Howard was so excited that he couldn't contain himself any longer. All at once, he orgasmed. At least he thought it was an orgasm until he saw the yellow fountain arc through the air and run down the front of Anita's blouse. Anita did a double take of surprise and said in exasperation, "Oh, Howard! How could you? Look at what you've done to me! You've peed all over my new blouse!" Howard wanted to feel sorry for what he had done to her, but the sight of her covered in his pee made him laugh uncontrollably. The abdominal contractions caused by his laughter loosed his bladder again and another arc of urine sprang forth to soak the changing pad and side of the dresser. For some reason, Howard felt his latest accident had been inevitable. He giggled uncontrollably as Anita shook her head in maternal forbearance and pulled the clean diaper up between his legs to catch the jets of pee that continued to spurt out of his tiny penis. The stream of urine seemed endless, he couldn't stop. He chortled helplessly, rocking from side to side in convulsions of laughter while Anita patiently held the diaper in place. "You little dickens!", she laughed tolerantly as she waited for him to stop peeing, "I should have expected something like this from you! Look at you! You think that peeing on Mommy is hysterical! Well, now it's official. You've christened me as your Mommy!" She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead ceremonially, then she said in a parody of her marriage vows, "I accept the position. I promise to love, pamper and watch over you, in sickness and in health, whether your dydees are clean and dry or wet and messy, for all the days of your life. And you, Howie? Do you take me as your Mommy, to love, adore and obey, in dydees and in onesies, promise to nurse on your ba-ba, eat the baby food that Mommy feeds you and play quietly in your crib or playpen with your duckie, your blankie while sucking on your binkie? Say 'Gaa'!" Howard giggled again at her ridiculous joke and squealed a loud "Gaaaaa" of feigned agreement. Anita nodded and said in mock solemnity, "Then by the power you vested in me when you granted me guardianship over you with your unlimited power-of-attorney, I declare myself to be your Mommy and designate you to be my baby, til death do us part." Anita smiled broadly at her joke and said, "There, it's official for the both of us. You're Mommy's little baby now!" Howard's giggles subsided with his pee and he lay quietly as Anita took another disposable and dabbed the wet spots on her blouse before sopping up the puddle of his pee on the pad with the spare diaper. Then she tossed the wet diapers in the dirty diaper pail and took another diaper from the stack to rediaper him. This time, she crossed his legs at the ankles and held them up with one hand to keep him from peeing on her while she slid the fresh diaper under his bottom. Anita worked quickly, tugging the diaper up between his legs and taping it firmly about his waist. Anita stopped for a moment and examined her work with the light of maternal love in her eyes. The thick nighttime diaper bulged out prominently from his groin, hiding the remnants of his manhood innocently beneath the sexless white cover and promising that whatever mess he made would be safely contained within its soft absorbent fill. The padding of the diaper was so full that Howard's legs were pushed apart and spread them akimbo. Anita was so taken with the sight of the angelic infant that lay before her that she immediately forgave him for peeing on her and began playing with him again. She took the heels of his feet in her hands again, this time secure in the knowledge that she was protected from his infantile lack of control and lifted them in the air. Anita brought his heels together and separated them repeatedly with a grin of merriment on her face. She bent down to nuzzle her nose against the round bulge of his padded crotch and inhaled the clean sweet perfume of his diaper. When she brought his legs together again, the velvety baby skin of his inner thighs pressed coolly against her cheeks. Little Howie's skin was so soft, it felt like the wings of an angel were brushing against her face; he smelled heavenly. It struck her that the helpless little creature that lay before her had nothing to do with her former husband. All of Howard's sins had been washed away with his transformation into infancy. This was an innocent little baby who depended on her to take care of him. Then she straightened, picked him up from the pad and held him next to her breast for a few minutes while she cuddled him lovingly. He was so small that she could cradle his entire bottom in one hand. She smiled down at him maternally as she saw the tiny stubby fingers of his little hand work their way up her damp blouse and lock themselves in a fold of the fabric for reassurance. Anita shifted her other hand from his back to his head and stroked his scant fine hair affectionately as she hummed a wordless lullaby. After a while, she took him over to the oaken rocking chair in the corner of the nursery and sat with him nestled him in her arm. It only took fifteen minutes of rocking in her arms to make him fall into a sound asleep. Anita got up quietly from the rocking chair and gently laid him in his crib. She covered him with his blankie, then bent over and blessed him a feather-light kiss on the top of his nearly hairless head to insure sweet dreams for him in the night.
The next morning Anita woke him up and babied him as she had the night before. Howard allowed her to feed him and clothe him as if he was truly the eight month old he appeared to be. After breakfast, Anita changed his dirty diaper and dressed him in a fleecy baby-blue onesie before putting him in his playpen. She left him to play with his toys while she got dressed for work. When she was dressed, she went to the kitchen to prepare his diaper bag. When she was done, she returned to the family room to find him laying on his back sucking his thumb and waving his legs in the air indolently. Anita took him out of the playpen and hoisted him up to ride on her hip, then carried him into the kitchen. She stopped at the kitchen table for a moment to pick up her purse and put the strap over her free shoulder. The strap on her purse was immediately followed with the strap of his diaper bag. Thus accoutered, she carried him to the Suburban and opened the rear door of the van. Howard wasn't terribly surprised to see that she had mounted a baby seat in the backseat of the Suburban. Underneath the babyseat she had placed a colorful plastic mat that extended for two feet in every direction from the boundaries of the babyseat to protect the leather upholstery of the Suburban. Despite his anger at Anita's theft of his Suburban, Howard approved of her attempts to care for it properly. If his diaper or baby bottle leaked a little, the spill would be contained to the area covered by the plastic mat where the mess could be easily wiped off with a sponge. Within minutes, she had him strapped into the seat she had installed the night before. Despite his the high vantage point offered him by the baby seat in the Suburban, Howard could see little of what passed. The wing-like padded projections of the baby seat acted like blinders on a horse. He could only see objects that were directly in front of him like the backs of the front seats or the rear of Anita's head. His shape of his eyeballs had changed with his body and given him the nearsightedness of infancy. Anything beyond the range of the hood of the Suburban was a hopeless visual blur. The gentle rocking of the Suburban as it navigated the city streets and the reassuring humming of the engine lulled him to sleep almost immediately. When the trip was over, Anita took her dozing infant out of the babyseat and strapped him into a folding stroller, then placed his diaper bag into the tray affixed to the bottom of the stroller before wheeling him into the Daycare Center.
After Howard arrived at the daycare, he didn't object when the women put him in a playpen and treated him like the other infants in the nursery. He thought it was strange that no one seemed surprised at how small he had gotten in twenty four hours. Howard wondered about their reactions for a moment before his attention was captured by the bright blue ball in his playpen. He couldn't concentrate on any thought more than a few minutes and was easily distracted by the slightest motion or sound. His sensorium had seemed to have multiplied a thousand-fold in the preceding twenty-four hours. Ordinary noises seemed to boom in his ears and colors leaped out of mundane objects that he would have ignored two months before. The soft clicks of the wooden building blocks as they tumbled against each other on the nursery floor sounded like the clash of concrete construction bricks. When he cried, his anguished screams blotted out the world. His wails drowned out the universe and left nothing but his psychic pain. His taste buds had revitalized and he re-discovered favors that he had not been able to savor since babyhood. The whole world seemed shiny and new. Even the simple act of picking up a baby toy was a new experience. His fingers had grown so short and pudgy that he had to wrap his entire hand around the smallest object to get a grip on it. He spent most of his day napping, waking only to have his diaper changed or be given his bottle. The Daycare workers fed him the bottles of thin, sweet formula that Anita had packed in the diaper bag before leaving home and were careful to put a clean cloth diaper over their shoulders before they picked him up to burp him. He frequently spit up formula when he was being winded. When it was time for lunch they'd put him in a high chair to spoon feed him from a little jar of pureed baby food that Anita had packed with his formula bottles.
Howard was oblivious to his treatment. Nothing seemed to matter to him. Even trying to talk like a toddler was too much effort, it was easier to grunt like a baby or cry to have his needs fulfilled. He gurgled in delight when Anita came to take him home, where he was fed, bathed, rediapered and allowed to play until it was time to be put in his crib. Sometimes at night she would pick him up and hold him on her lap while she watched TV. Howard would rest comfortably in the crook of her arm and would lay his head against her soft breast for a pillow. She would wrap her arm around his little body protectively and hold his diapered bottom on her lap with her hand. If he got fussy, she would stick a pacifier in his mouth to calm him down and drape his baby blanket over his legs and tummy. Howard found the combination of the pacifier and the secure nearness of her body soporific. He felt so warm and cozy in her lap. He would often fall asleep in her arms trying to watch TV with her. It was difficult to concentrate on the documentaries or dramas she favored and he could hardly keep his eyes open after listening for more than fifteen minutes. Every day that week was a repetition of the other, until he couldn't remember how long he had been going to the daycare or even what day it was.
Howard barely noticed that each day they seemed to be feeding him less solid food and giving him more bottles of formula. At first Anita had fed him an entire jar of baby food at one sitting and had instructed his attendant at the Daycare to do the same. Gradually the amount she gave him was reduced until by the end of the week, he was down to half a jar. The lack of solid food didn't make Howard any hungrier, the baby formula was very filling and Anita made sure he had more formula to drink every day. Anita changed the composition of his diet too. The pureed chicken and rice dinners he was initially given were slowly replaced with jarred vegetables, fruits and cereals. By the end of the week, Anita had withdrawn all meats from his diet and was only rarely feeding him prepared egg yolks. The change in diet made eliminating his poop very easy for Howard. The poo became so soft it fairly slid from his behind before he knew what was happening. The substitution of formula for solid food had another effect that would have surprised Howard had he thought about it; his stools were becoming less odoriferous. The strained carrots and peas produced few of the sulfurous compounds and aldehydes that composed the smellier components of fecal stench. Egg yolks were of course another story, but Anita was giving him eggs so infrequently that for all practical purposes, she could have honestly been said to have put him on a lacto-vegan diet. If she had somehow managed to put him on a diet that consisted solely of mother's milk, the odor would have vanished entirely. As it was, the clues that would have told Howard that he had messed in his diaper were rapidly diminishing, leaving him utterly ignorant of the condition of his dydee. Unless he had eaten something untoward or someone pulled open the back of his diaper to check, he rarely knew if he had pooped.
Anita had asked the Daycare workers to chart his vitals during the day while she was at work. During the first week at the center they had him stand on a doctor's scale to weigh him, but after he regressed to the size of a eight month old infant, they began putting him on a baby scale like the other infants in the nursery. He didn't even fuss when they pulled down his diapers and stuck a thermometer in his bottom to take his temperature. He was long passed being humiliated by being treated like a baby. Besides, he kind of liked the feeling the thermometer made when the attendant popped it out of his behind; it gave him the same pleasant sensation he had when he pooped.
At least he wasn't being ignored like the other babies in the nursery. Attendants would come in and sit down on the nursery floor beside him every day to play silly games with him at length every morning before they put him down for his nap. At first Howard found the games to be ludicrously easy, but as time passed the games became more difficult to play. It wasn't that the games changed, after all, making stacks of building blocks didn't admit of complex rules. Even so, the tall tower of ten blocks that was his best effort quickly gave way to a lesser stack of seven blocks a few days later and then five by the end of the first week. It was becoming more difficult to concentrate and weigh the exact position of each added block with respect to the stability of the tower as a whole. As a result, towers that were higher than his ability allowed tottered and swayed as he positioned the last block on top and then crashed to the carpet. Nonetheless, the attendant would always praise him for his efforts and suggest he try again. When he became annoyed at the foolish exercise, the attendant would switch to another game to amuse him. The other games too were easy at first, then became more difficult to do as time went on. The attendant would have him stack rings on pegs in ascending or descending order on the toy he had found so facile during his first week. After a few days, he had to study the rings for long periods to decide which one was the largest or smallest of the group so he could assign it to its proper place in the sequence. Sometimes she would get a pair of small plastic sand buckets and put a few balls in the bucket she held in her hand. The object of the game seemed to be to match the number of balls that she had placed in her bucket with an equal number of balls in his bucket. Like the other games, Howard found the game to be absurdly easy initially, but after a few days, counting the balls became almost impossible when they numbered greater than five.
When that failed, she would have him close his eyes and touch his nose with his finger. This took quite a bit of miming to get across without words. The attendant would smile at him invitingly and then close her eyes dramatically and touch her nose with a finger with exaggerated motions. Then she would open her eyes to see if he had aped her movements. If he didn't, she'd repeat the theatrical exercise until he had. It only took two demonstrations at first to get him to copy her movements faithfully, but after a few days he discovered it was impossible to find the tip of his nose with his finger. It kept going into his eye or missing his head altogether. Sometimes she would lift his leg and have him touch his toes with his eyes closed. On the first day he found it easy, but on the second day he seemed to have lost his foot. He could only touch his toes if he was looking directly at them. Frequently he would lose interest in the game and start looking around the room for something easier and more interesting to do. When this happened the attendant would try to entice him into continuing the infantile play by demonstrating how simple it was. Howard would try again until his interest waned, then he would lose his temper and begin crying in frustration. His crankiness was always interpreted by the attendant as a signal that he wasn't interested in playing anymore. She would pick him up and comfort him for a while in her arms and put him down in his crib for a nap after he had quieted. Every day [SW1]the nursery furniture seemed to get bigger to Howard. It wasn't that he was getting any smaller, but his perceptions of the world changed as he gradually made the mental adaptation to his new environment. Anita informed the Daycare workers that he was to be referred to his baby name of Bri-Bri and they had complied without a word of argument. It didn't matter to Howard what he was called. Since Anita had taken to calling him Bri-Bri, they was no reason they couldn't call him that too. He stopped attempting to walk and crawled around his parquet floored room while he played. The huge size of adult shoes when he crept among the adults who took care of him became an accepted part of his world. When he crept on the wooden floor, the skin of his knees and the palms of his hands stuck to the slightly tacky surface of the waxed floor. He would often creep up to the plastic gate that separated his room from the rest of the house and peer out in wonder at how large the pictures in the hallway had gotten. He couldn't remember who the subjects of the family pictures were, he only knew that it gave him a sense of security to see them there on the walls as they had always been. When Anita let him into the family room to play, she either sat on the couch and watched as he crawled at her feet or she would put him in his playpen. Occasionally, she would sit him in his walker so he could propel himself around the house with his feet but still have his baby hands kept out of mischief by the wide expanse of the plastic tray that was an integral part of the walker. Howard always enjoyed that, he would scoot around the house as fast as he could, bumping into furniture and caroming off corners in his search for new things to look at. If he found something particularly interesting, he would stretch his arms out to it in hope that Anita would get it and hand it to him. Most of the time she didn't, but when she did, he would examine the object closely. Touching it and looking at it from all sides before he smelled it and put it in his mouth. For some reason, he had developed an almost overpowering urge to put things in his mouth. This almost always caused Anita to take the object away from him and put it out of his reach. He would cry a little when she did that. Once he had recovered from his disappointment, he would scoot off to another part of the house to explore. Everyday objects seemed to different to him after his change. Every time he looked at something, it felt like the first time he had ever seen it.
Everything seemed so huge and foreign to him after he began his daily internment in the Daycare center. Even the nipple on the baby bottle seemed to be getting larger. His adult mind started fading out for hours at a time, letting his infantine subconscious rule his body. As the intervals between adult thinking became longer, it became more difficult to assume full control after his mind cleared. Sometime during the first week, Howard tried to talk and was dismayed to discover that he couldn't even manage the simple speech of a toddler. All that came out of his mouth were incomprehensible gurgles. Howard gave up and let the women do as they pleased with his body without comment.
Instead of the games they played in the past, the attendants would bring him stuffed animals in cardboard boxes. They would let him look at the toys for a few minutes, then cover up the boxes and either add, remove or leave the toys alone. Then they would expose the toys within and note his surprise or lack of interest. At first it was easy to remember what was in the box, but as the days passed he had problems remembering how many toy duckies or bunnies he had seen. Frankly, he couldn't even remember who his regular attendant was during the second week. Somehow his memory had edited out any distinguishing features that differentiated the attendants from each other. As far as Howard was concerned, they were all the same. He was warm and well fed and no one ever tried to stop him from taking the naps that ate up a large part of his days. The calendar became meaningless as entire days were swallowed and digested by his subconscious without his adult mind waking to see what he was becoming. When they did let him out to play on the floor, it was always under the watchful eye of an attendant. He would crawl around the infant play area mouthing various toys, leaving a trail of drool wherever he went. Sometimes he would just sit and put his fingers in his mouth or roll over on his back and suck his toes. On occasion his adult mind would wake from its slumber and wonder what the Hell he was doing. He would take his toes out of his mouth with an embarrassed look on his face and glance around to see if someone had seen him behaving like an infant. Invariably, someone had. Loose infants on the floor were always carefully watched at the Daycare to keep them out of trouble. When he was caught in one of his humiliating acts, he would stick his toes back in his mouth to continue the pretence and hide his chagrin. His attendant always got a big grin on her face when he sucked on his toes so he did it fairly often to get her to smile at him. She would often get out a Polaroid camera and take pictures of him creeping on the floor or sucking on his fingers and toes to add to the chart she kept of his vital signs. Baby Bri-Bri loved being the center of attention.
When Bri-Bri appeared nervous or couldn't sleep when it was his naptime, his attendant would put him in a small white swing that was powered by a windup music box and let the motion of the swing and tinkling notes of the music box sooth him to sleep with its tinny mechanical lullaby. The deep plasticized cloth seat of the swing had leg holes that the attendant guided his legs through like a giant pair of loose panties. When he sat in the swing, the front of the seat came over his tummy almost up to the level of his chest. The "A" frame of metal support pipes on either side was more than sufficient to maintain stability of the swing. Bri-Bri couldn't fall out or tip the swing over no matter how hard he tried. The deep seat and his free hanging legs gave him no purchase to push or pull himself out of the seat. He couldn't have gotten out of the swing unassisted even if he had wanted to free himself. Like the yielding nylon mesh of his playpen, the swing was only another means of keeping him captive in the soft protection of his nursery/prison. Bri-Bri didn't mind, he was rapidly becoming institutionalized. It was easy to lie back and let everyone do all the work and thinking for him. Thinking was too difficult and his diminishing vocabulary made it almost impossible to conceive of anything beyond his immediate needs. Only terrible fear could spur his once active mind back into normal function. Since an infant's life is protected from the terrors of youth and the more intellectual fears of adulthood, he vegetated. His infant's body and neurology was incapable of normal speech, making his poor efforts at rational thinking a waste of time. If he was wet or hungry, he cried and his attendant saw to his needs.
On Saturday morning the weather was warm and overcast so Anita made plans to go to the park. The weather was warm and dry so she decided that a T-shirt and diaper would be sufficient for little Bri-Bri. Since she didn't know how long they would be there, she put an overnight diaper on him with a doubler stuffed in the front of the diaper. She packed his diaper bag with his T-shirt if it became sunny and a couple of soft drinks for her in his diaper bag and put him in the baby seat in the back seat of the Suburban. When they arrived, she took him out of the back seat and sat him in his stroller. True to her word, she hadn't asked him to walk beside her. Bri-Bri had dim memory of Anita promising him that she would never again make him walk beside her in the park and realized that she had not lied. All he had to do was sit in the stroller while Anita did all the work. At first Bri-Bri was embarrassed to be seen in nothing but a diaper, but he soon got over it. The only people he saw on the path were a few glazed-eyed joggers who were so high on their own adrenaline that they barely noticed the attractive mother pushing a diapered baby in a stroller. It was obvious that the only visual information that was being received through the filter of their oxygen-starved, glycogen burning metabolism was the signal that an object was in their path. They guided around automatically to go huffing and puffing off into the tree shrouded distance. A few minutes into the stroll through the park, he realized that he wouldn't have to worry about finding a restroom. By the time he knew he had to go, he would have already relieved himself in his diaper.
Bri-Bri quickly forgot his state of relative undress and concentrated on the green world that surrounded him. He was fascinated with the number of colors on the leaves of the trees he saw. He had never known there were so many hues of green and yellow. He tried to count them on his fingers, but the profusion of subtle shades made him run out of fingers before he had finished enumerating the colors on one branch alone. He gave up and decided to enjoy the outing from his new perspective. He was so close to the ground that he could discern the blades of grass that sprang up on either side of the asphalted path. Acorns carpeted the ground beneath the enormous oaks and had been scattered all about the park by an army of industrious squirrels intent on burying their nutritious booty. Where the old pecan trees grew, thousands of pecan hulls littered the ground in profusion. It was a nut gatherer's paradise. The huge limbs of the pecan and live oak trees arched and twisted over him like the vaulted ceiling of a green gothic cathedral. Green-grey clumps of Spanish moss hung from the branches lending an unearthly surrealistic quality to the ancient trees. The long dangling trails of moss looked like the forgotten favors of saintly earth-maidens who had passed and left filmy kerchiefs in honor of the majesty of the venerable life who ruled the wood. The very air seemed to glow with the verdant vibrations of botanical life. Squirrels ran up and down the trunks with abandon in their protected reserve. They gathered acorns and pecans, chased each other and chittered down at him like living gargoyles that served to frighten evil spirits away from the holy place. Bri-Bri discovered that the mere act of breathing was an experience to be savored. When he inhaled, his nostrils were filled with the rich forest aroma with its hints of growing and decaying life.
As they neared the playground, they were greeted by Joey's mother. At first Bri-Bri had been terrified of being recognized and soaked his diaper in dread of discovery. The diaper doubler saved Bri-Bri further embarrassment initially as it absorbed his first spurts of pee without leaving a stain. Once begun, however, the process of evacuating his bladder continued until it was empty. It seemed like the entire contents of his morning bottle were being voided into the padding of his diaper. A warm feeling spread from his crotch to his bottom as his pee was pulled by capillary action up to the rear of his diaper. The diaper became soft and pressed against his inner thighs as the filling combined with his urine and expanded into an aqueous gel. Bri-Bri realized that the soggy condition of his bulging diaper must be obvious to anyone who looked at him. Joey's mother looked at Bri-Bri and commented jokingly at how young Anita's son had become and pointing out how wise Anita had been to put him back in diapers. She observed that little Howie would need a diaper change soon as his diaper looked like it was about to burst with baby pee.
Bri-Bri panicked at the woman's jibes and began to make incoherent noises of absolute terror. Anita reacted to his fearful gibbering by bending over and putting a pacifier in his mouth to quiet him while she talked. Anita explained that Howie, the preschooler who had been with her when they had met in the park, was her nephew rather than her son. Howie was her sister's child and had only been visiting her while his mother was in the hospital and had since gone to live with his Grandmother. She went on to tell Joey's mother that her sister's baby had been staying with his Grandmother during her sister's illness, but their mother had found the duties of caring for an infant too taxing and had asked Anita to take her sister's baby under her wing instead of the more easily cared-for preschooler. Bri-Bri needn't have worried. Joey's mother swallowed Anita's story hook, line and sinker. She commented once on the family resemblance between the two youngsters after hearing the story and let the matter drop.
Anita bent over on the strength of her acquaintance's comment and discovered that she was right. Howie's dydee was sopping wet. She took the diaper bag out of the wire rack in the bottom and set it on the grass to the side of the asphalt path. She opened the side of the bag and took out the plastic covered changing pad which was supplied when she bought the bag. Anita took some care and selected a grassy spot that was close but didn't have hidden rocks or entrance to fire ant colonies. Once she had made her preparations, she positioned the pad on her pre-selected spot, then she hauled Bri-Bri out of the stroller and gently laid him down on the pad. Bri-Bri was mildly embarrassed to be treated like an infant in front of a stranger, but the orthodontic pacifier in his mouth muffled his small whimpers of distress.
Once Anita started ripping the tape tabs off the front of the diaper, his reaction was entirely different. Joey's mother looked on in maternal amusement as Anita nonchalantly pulled his diaper down and began to wipe his pubes with a towelette she took from the small blue plastic travel container of baby wipes. Howard rocked from side-to-side and kicked his feet in an attempt to get Anita to stop, but Anita's diapering techniques had been acquired at an early age while caring for her profusion of baby brothers. She had no difficulties cleaning him up and quickly ensconcing him in another overnight diaper despite his wild thrashing. Howard was mortified. His face turned beet-red as he struggled to voice his complaints around the pacifier gag. Although Joey's mother had no concept of who he really was, the idea of being stripped nude in public, having his pubes and bottom wiped clean, and then rediapered as if he was an inanimate children's doll was humiliating. Bri-Bri had accepted Anita as his caretaker and had gotten used to the attendants at the Daycare Center ministering to his bodily needs, but the concept of being cared for outside of either milieu had not sunk into his forebrain. A moment later, Anita had him back in the stroller and was walking down the path to the playground accompanied by her friend. Bri-Bri was actually glad when Anita took his bottle out of the diaper bag, unzipped it from its portable "cozy" cooler and stuck the nipple in his mouth. At least when he had the bottle raised, it hid his face.
As they neared the boundaries of the playground, Joey came running up from out of the trees. "Where were you, Mommy?", he said with a note of apprehension in his voice, "I was on the slide and turned around and you weren't there! I thought you got lost!"
Joey's mother smiled at him and said in her most smoothing tones, "You shouldn't have gotten worried, Darling. I just saw a friend and came over to talk to her. Surely you remember her, she was taking care of her nephew, Howie, the last time we saw her."
"Oh, him!", Joey said in disgust, "He's the one who got sick on the merry-go-round and pooped in his pants! I hope he isn't here today. I want to play on the merry-go-round some more. Who's this, his baby brother?"
"Exactly!", said Joey's mother brightly.
"Well? What's his name?", said Joey with a splendid ignorance of adult manners or verbal elocutions.
Joey's mother looked surprised, with all that had been said, she had never learned the baby's name. She turned to Anita and waited in askance. Anita smiled and said, "His name is Bri-Bri, or at least that's what we call him. His given name is Brian. Don't you think he looks sweet?"
Joey face took on an appearance of adolescent distaste with things maternal and said grudgingly, "I suppose. I don't know anything about that. Where's Howie?"
Anita explained before Joey's mother had the chance, saying, "Howie's staying with his grandmother, Joey. I don't think he'll be able to come here to play with you again."
"Oh," said Joey with unconcern and ran off to play on the monkey bars.
Anita sat down on the park bench beside her acquaintance with the stroller parked in front of her. Bri-Bri finished his bottle in peace and fell asleep in the stroller as the two women discussed the difficulties of raising a child and keeping a job. The talk drifted to discussions about diaper rashes and babysitters; i.e., how prevent and treat the former and how to locate a suitable candidate for the latter. Joey's mother had ready answers for both problems and was pleased to give Anita the benefit of her knowledge. After a half hour or so, Anita said her goodbyes and took Bri-Bri back to the parking lot to go home. She thought had been a pleasant outing in the park. Bri-Bri barely remembered it when he woke that evening. The ambiance of the woods had been so unreal that he believed the entire experience was a dream.
When they got home, Anita made some phone calls and gave Bri-Bri his bottle before putting him down for his nap. She picked up the house until late that afternoon, when she started getting ready to go out. When she got Bri-Bri up from his afternoon nap, she was dressed in nothing but a bath towel as if she had just taken a shower. She gave him a bottle and sat him in his playpen while she went to the bedroom to get dressed. When she emerged, he saw that she was wearing her best black evening gown over her slinkiest black hose. The smell of her perfume filled the air and negated the scent of baby powder which hung around Bri-Bri like a pall. His adult mind woke as if a magic potion had been waved under his nose. Suddenly, he was aware of his surroundings and all that it implied about what had happened to him. He had allowed himself to slip into the non-thinking ease of infancy. Anita's perfume could only mean one thing. She planned to go out that night! Anita never wore that perfume unless she was going out on a date with him! Howard panicked. Was she seeing another man? Did she plan to leave him there alone and uncared for, trapped in his playpen until he died of thirst? Ever since his rejuvenation she had been there to take care of him. Even when she had had to work, she had put him in the Daycare at her company so she could visit him during the day and be there immediately if there was an emergency and he needed her. He hadn't appreciated being put into the Daycare at the beginning, but later he had realized how considerate she was to make the arrangements so she could be close to him all day long. At first he had rebelled against her control, but as his powers diminished with his size, he had become dependant on her help. He couldn't survive without her, he needed her!
When Howard saw that she wasn't leaving immediately, he began to calm down. Of course she wouldn't leave him, she was his wife! She had simply forgotten to tell him that they were going out that night. Considering his infantile behavior of late, he couldn't blame her for not consulting him. After all, it had been weeks since he had had an adult conversation. He sat in his playpen as she transferred her ladies wallet and lipstick into a black-beaded evening purse wondering when she was going to dress him for their outing. She had changed his diaper after his nap but had not bothered to put anything else on him since that time. Surely she wouldn't take him to a fancy restaurant wearing only a diaper while she was wearing her best black evening gown! It just wasn't possible that she could leave him! He knew her Catholic upbringing and how her mind worked, she may have been upset with him for not having a baby with her but her religious beliefs wouldn't let her commit adultery with another man! One she was married, it was forever for her. She had sworn before God and Man to stand by him in illness and in health. The ethics that her mother had instilled in her as a child wouldn't allow her to leave him while he was in such a condition. She knew how helpless he had become! He felt deep in the nethermost reaches of his soul that she was incapable of sleeping with a man other than her husband.
Nevertheless, her preparations bothered Howard in a way he couldn't define. There was something unsettling about her going out on a Saturday night in her best even if she did intend to bring him with her. Did she plan to order a high chair for him and have the cook warm his bottle while she dined on Filet Minion and garlicked potatoes while sipping on vintage Burgundy? Howard mourned the loss of his teeth which made him unable to eat the fresh crusty bread of their favorite French restaurant. Their succulent rare steaks soaked in cognac and smothered in green peppercorns was a thing of the past for Howard. At best he might be able to stomach a tiny timbale of garden vegetables force-sieved through a ricer and cooked in small steel custard cups to emerge as firm multicolored-layered cones like a vegetarian's version of Neapolitan ice cream. Unfortunately, Howard hated vegetables in all varieties except potatoes. Perhaps the renewed ability to taste granted by his rejuvenated body would render the flavor palatable. Howard doubted it. He dreaded the idea of going out to dinner to a fancy restaurant with Anita in his condition. The thought of being treated like an infant by the maitre d' was depressing. He was too used to being treated like the visiting Lord of the Demesne to be comfortable in the role as the helpless ward of his Lady. When he gave orders as a man, he expected the underlings to whisper furiously at each other in their haste to do his bidding. Instead of the usual rush to do his will, the best he could hope for was a condescending smile from the maitre d' as his feeding bib was ceremoniously tied around his neck by a busboy while the wine steward brought his warmed bottle of formula wrapped in a linen napkin for presentation to his ostensible "mother" before he would be allowed to nurse.
It would be a humiliating experience. Still, he preferred the embarrassment to being left to his own devices. Despite his intense desire to regain control his life, Howard knew he was incapable of being left on his own in his present condition. He had become dependent on Anita to take care of him. The Daycare Center was closed on weekends. What the Hell did she have planned? Surely she didn't intend to forsake him and leave him alone!
Anita appeared unperturbed as she put on her high heels and made her final preparations for her night on the town. She made two phone calls, but Howard couldn't make out what was being said. Anita seemed to be all smiles as she primped her hair one last time in the mirror of the entry hall. When the doorbell rang, she escorted a pretty young woman of about eighteen years into the living room. She introduced Howard to her as her nephew Bri-Bri and smiled as the high school senior cooed over what a sweet baby he was. Howard was stunned when Anita gravely introduced the girl as Rose and told him that she would be his babysitter that evening. The babysitter laughed at Anita's joke, knowing that the baby boy in the playpen couldn't have possibly understood his aunt's mock introduction to her.
Anita gave Rose a printed list of phone numbers were she could be reached, including the miniature pager she had put in her evening purse. Then she gave her a tour of the house starting with the nursery and bathroom and ending in the kitchen. She showed her where Bri-Bri's baby food and formula were kept and told her that she was free to drink the Cokes or Sprites in the refrigerator and make herself a snack if she got hungry. Anita gave her a list with Bri-Bri's schedule and said that she didn't expect to be home before one or two in the morning as she was going out to dinner and a play with a friend. Rose promised to take good care of baby Bri-Bri. The doorbell rang again and Anita went to answer it. She invited the person at the door in and Fran stepped into the hall, dressed to the nines. When Anita went back to get her purse, Fran followed and stood over Howard's playpen with a huge grin on her face. Anita came over to the playpen, picked Howard up and deposited a maternal kiss on his forehead, commending him to the care of his babysitter and commanding him to be a "good baby" for Rose. Then she lowered him gently to the floor of the pen and took her leave of him. Fran smiled at Howard's expression of surprise as he stood with wobbly knees at the side of the playpen, hanging on to the rails to keep himself upright. Fran blew him a kiss and said with a sardonic grin, "Goodnight, Bri-Bri! Have a good time with your new ladyfriend! I know it won't be long before you'll find yourself being held lovingly in her arms. I'm sure that before the end of the night, she'll tenderly disrobe you with her own hands to see what you're hiding in your pants. She may even be so taken with your manly charms that she'll sing you a sweet love song. There's nothing like a soothing lullaby from a woman to help a man sleep like a baby!"
Rose chuckled at Fran's flippancy as she saw the women out and locked the door behind them. Then she came back into the room to find Howard silently weeping in abandonment. "There, there little one. Don't worry! Rose will take good care of you! Would you like your ba-ba?"
Howard's feeling of being abandoned overwhelmed him, causing the anguished wails of a lonely baby to fill the air. At first Howard didn't know where the sound was coming from. His emotion-clouded mind thought that somehow Rose had brought a screaming infant into the room without his knowing it. He didn't care about the other baby or its woes. His universe centered on himself, not the minor frustrations of another woman's infant. Anita had left him in the care of a stranger and had gone out on the town without him. The teenaged hireling she engaged to look after him didn't have any reason to care for him. She'd sit around watching TV while he languished in his playpen or crib in dirty diapers, unfed, uncared for and unloved. Anita didn't love him anymore! Who knew what would happen to him in her absence? Obviously, Anita didn't care. Since he wasn't a man anymore, his feelings were beneath consideration. Anita must have decided that his rejuvenation effectively annulled their marriage. She had gone out to find a real man to fill her life and make love to her. Once she found her new paramour, he would be pushed aside and forgotten. She might even put him up for adoption! Howard's despair was unbounded, he had reached the nadir of his existence. He closed his eyes and let the baby's cries wash over him and cover him like a dark blanket, protecting him from the demons that pursued him in his waking nightmare. He was alone in his pain. His wife had left him to survive without her. Images of his imminent death coming in a multitude of forms filled his mind; without his wife, he would die of thirst, starvation, exposure, and simple neglect.
As Rose's angelic face framed in its halo of golden hair neared him, he realized the infant's pained keening was coming from him. He looked up at her with the awe of a man who beholds a heavenly manifestation being sent to save him from the consequences of his all too human iniquity. As she bent down and picked him up, he felt liberated from his fears. The angelic creature would save him from oblivion. She held him close to her breasts, rocking him gently by turning her torso slightly from side-to-side as she cradled his tiny diapered bottom protectively in her hand and patted his back comfortingly. As his cries died down to whimpers of relief, he realized that he was the infant who had been crying. He huddled his tiny nose in the crevasse between her breasts in shame at his weakness and began weeping again from the depths of his being. This time, it wasn't the child in Howard who cried, it was the man. He had finally realized what he had become and sought solace in the bosom of his caretaker. Memories of the past two weeks flooded his mind. He had been an infant in thought and deed. He had sucked on his toes and enjoyed the sensation of laying on his back and satisfying his oral urges while he pooped and peed in his diaper freely. Rose was the catharsis that he needed. She would nurture and care for him no matter what he did. She expected nothing in return, not even his love. He relaxed in her arms and let her take command of his life. The maturity of her comely eighteen-year-old body made him feel like an insignificant creature who she deigned to pet for her amusement.
After a time, she sat down on the couch and sat him up in her lap while she used the remote control to find a program on SatNet that she liked. Rather than "surf" through the six hundred odd channels that the satellite offered, she used the menuing system to arrive at a choice quickly. She selected an Internet channel that would allow here to view her email from her friends without actually downloading it to Anita's DVD disk. She perused it quickly, made a decision and wiped the evidence cleanly without leaving a trace. In the old days of the Internet, she would have left caches and unwitting records of what she had done. But the constant attempts to invade personal privacy by both the government and business had made everyone a little paranoid.
In the Dark Ages of the Internet, the government had tried to censor the content with the Communication's Decency Act. When twenty thousand members of the Internet had gotten a permanent injunction against that law, the government had tried again with a FBI-spawned amendment to HR 695, titled the, "Security and Freedom through Encryption Act" or "SAFE", to force Americans to provide guaranteed law enforcement access to their private online communications and business transactions. In essence, the law guaranteed that the Federal government would have the "keys" to all private communications on the Internet. The proposals required that every part of the Internet, from the software on an individual's computer to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that carried an person's messages to the world, be quietly modified to allow the FBI instant access to whatever the individual did on the Internet. The intent of the FBI's plan was to create an invisible National Surveillance Infrastructure that could spy on the public whenever the FBI deemed it necessary, i.e., all the time. Freedom of expression and communication wasn't consonant with the FBI's view of how a crime-free society should be managed. When the business community realized the import of what the FBI planned, they howled in protest. Under the amendment as it had been proposed, the government could effectively outlaw encryption by fiat. The law would have granted executive powers to the FBI to certify encryption programs and to make the distribution of uncertified programs a Federal crime. In order for a program to be certified by the FBI, the programmer had to write a "secret" backdoor into the code. Of course, the same requirements would have been applied to business transactions over the Internet as well, giving the FBI the "keys" to everyone's bank accounts and savings. In short, the act would have granted the FBI the power not only to monitor communications, but the right to make purchases and to disperse the funds from a person's savings without their knowledge and consent.
What the FBI refused to recognize was that their so-called "official hackers" weren't very knowledgeable. If they had truly known what they were doing, they wouldn't have needed such a draconian law. Expert hackers had been reading people's email and "reallocating funds" from commercial banks for years. Businesses were well aware that there were superlative hackers on the Net who were more than capable of finding the "backdoors" in the code. hundreds of millions of dollars had already been written off the books by subtle geniuses working the sausage scam. The "sausage" was a neat little scam that exploited the bank's own perfidy with investor's accounts. The banks would promise continuous interest on an account rather than annual interest. This wasn't done because of some altruistic change in banking's avaricious thinking, rather it was a consequence of the introduction of computers into banking. Rather than consult a "lookup" table to compute annual interest, it was quicker to use an exponential equation to compute an individual's account on a continuous basis. Given the cost of computer time, it was cheaper to give the customer continuous interest than it was to pay using the time-honored annual tables. The banks made money on the deal. however, since bankers always want a little more in the kitty, they weren't precisely honest about how they managed the deposits into their investor's accounts. Since the equation was mathematical in origin, it yielded interest down to the fractions of a cent. Fractions of a cent could not be paid to customers since that wasn't a valid currency. The bankers weren't dismayed by the news, all the extra money could be diverted to the bank's own accounts as a rounding error. A small investor never noticed the penny's difference, but when the total investment in the bank was multiplied by billions of dollars, the money became serious indeed. Tens of millions piled up in the bank's coffers with no one the wiser. Except, of course, for a few very clever hackers. All they did was divert the bank's ill-gotten gains into accounts they set up for themselves. It is a principle of common law that a thief shall not gain from their theft, so the hackers took it for themselves. Justice had been done. When the annual audits came in and revealed the loss to the bank, the money managers were beside themselves. Not only had they lost hundreds of millions of dollars, they couldn't admit it without admitting that they themselves had been cheating the public. The perpetrators were discovered and threatened with extra-legal bodily harm if they continued in their unauthorized "redistribution" of the bank's wealth. When the miscreants pleaded innocence and demanded a public trial, the banks demurred and let them keep their ill-gotten gains. The managers knew it was better to write off a few hundred million dollars than let their lack of diligence become public knowledge. Besides, it wasn't really the bank's money anyway, they had been trying to "steal" it too!
The banks were frantic when they heard of the new law, they were well aware that if the security codes were broken, as they surely would be, even novice level hackers would have the "keys" to the kingdom. The government couldn't be held at fault, it had sovereign immunity for its acts. The blame would be laid squarely at the banker's feet. They would have to pick up the tab for Internet theft no matter whose fault it was, after all the public had entrusted their monies to their banks, and they had every right both legally and morally to expect that their investment be protected. The banks that backed up major credit cards were the most frightened. Federal law required that false purchases on credit cards be covered by the bank rather than the consumer. Their vaults were about to be opened by Federal fiat, and leave them holding the empty bags of loot.
Within days the members of the House Commerce Committee were inundated by hordes of special interest lobbyists for the banking industry. It was made known that the movers and shakers in banking did not share the FBI's concerns with being able to snoop in people's private affairs. The representatives were told that if their support of the amendment to the law continued, the banks would have to seek representation elsewhere. The banks could not afford to donate money to representatives who caused horrendous losses to the industry. When the representatives came up for re-election, even their ability to finance loans for their campaigns would be in question. The amendment died on the vine and life went on normally on the Internet.
Shareware programs abounded to help people wipe all records of what they had done on the Internet. With the advent of satellite connections to the Internet, advertising had gone wild. At first Congress had tried foolish measures like outlawing mass mailings and porno, until it finally sunk into their dimwitted minds that the Internet was international and no law they passed could affect a foreign server. They had tried to enforce a Lege Americana and seen it fail miserably. American Federal police became pariahs in the international community when they attempted and failed to kidnap foreign violators and bring them before Federal Courts. Members of the FBI, DEA and CIA became persona non grata in almost every free country of the world. Several countries went so far as to make it illegal for members of American police and intelligence community to enter their countries without requesting permission from their government first. The State department went wild and told the President that America was in danger of becoming isolated from the rest of the world. Congress considered shutting the Internet down in the United States, but the combined business interests of the First World had made them see that if the politicians continued their unwarranted interference, they would find themselves being burned on a virtual pyre while tied to the stake of world opinion. Business had too much to lose to let thumb-fingered idiot politicians to make decisions that affected their bottom line. In a word, Congress was stuck. The Internet censorship laws were quietly rescinded and the American public was allowed to "surf" the Internet as it pleased.
The millions of dollars companies had spent on satellite launches had kept the telephone companies at bay. Download speeds of sixteen megabits per second were common after Motorola put their Celestri satellite in orbit and performance wasn't degraded by the satellite's upload speed two to ten megabits either. Overnight, the Internet became the property of big business as multinational companies saw the wisdom in controlling their own piece of Internet traffic. More satellites were launched by a host of competitors, dropping the subscription fees to affordable levels. The initial cost of the seven hundred-fifty dollar satellite dish diminished in impact as inflation raised wages and the downward pressure of mass sales brought its cost within the means of even the lower middle class. The deal was sweetened when the satellites began transmitting high definition television as well. People began using public servers for their email so they could access their mail from any location. Over eighty-five percent of America's households were subscribers to satellite Internet and television services. Only the very poor were excluded from the new technology.
After Rose had reviewed her mail, she switched over to another channel and lay back against the cushion to watch TV with Howard nestled comfortably in her lap. The channel she had selected was playing an old movie. Howard dimly remembered seeing it when he was in his mid-twenties. It was an oddly spiritual love story called "Ghost". Rose pulled him in closer as the movie progressed, holding his bottom affectionately as she When the actors began disrobing during a scene that was a prelude to sex, Rose put her other hand between his legs and began to unconsciously rub his pubic region. Howard was appalled by her actions but could not find it within him to try to stop her. It was titillating in a way that had been forgotten in his earliest childhood. Her ministrations didn't exactly make him horny, but the didn't exactly not make him horny either. There was an absurd inchoate sense about the sensations he was feeling that stopped him from interfering with the motion of her hand. As she stroked, he realized that his tiny penis had become erect under the thick padding of the disposable diaper. Howard thought mournfully that his involuntary reaction was more of a primitive response to the physical pleasure he was feeling rather than an expression of adult sexual passion. Instead of responding actively to her unconscious foreplay, he lay back in surrender and rested his head against the softness of her ample breasts. By the time the scene was over and she stopped stroking him, Howard was sleeping serenely in her lap.
When the movie was over, Rose decided it was time for little Bri-Bri's bottle. She gently took him in her arms and carried him over to his playpen to keep him out of mischief while she was in the kitchen. Howard mewled uncomfortably in his sleep when she laid him on the plastic mat of the playpen, but didn't wake. Rose took a pre-prepared bottle of formula out of the refrigerator and put it in a pot of water and turned on the burner beneath the pot to warm. She reviewed Bri-Bri's schedule and saw that it was late enough to let her feed him his dinner. The note indicated that he was to eat half a jar of mixed vegetables with his formula that night. Rose rummaged through the pantry for a few minutes until she found the jar of baby food that Bri-Bri's aunt had directed should be fed to him and set it on the kitchen table while she found his feeding spoon and bib. Then she went back to the range and checked on the bottle. When she removed the bottle from the pot to shake a few drops on the inside of her wrist to check the temperature of the formula, she felt that the plastic of the bottle had gotten too warm for little hands to hold comfortably. Rose turned down the burner and added some cold water from the faucet to cool the water in the pot before she put the bottle back into the water. Once all the preparations had been made, she went to wake Bri-Bri and bring him to the kitchen for his dinner.
Howard woke to find himself being lifted from his playpen to be slung over her right hip. He looked sleepily at his new vantage point. She had settled him square on top of the ridge of her pelvis with one leg on either side of her. If he turned his head, his chin just touched the top of her breast. Rose put her hand under his bottom and held him close as she carried him into the kitchen. Howard thought that being carried that way by a woman was delightful. Aside from the obvious attraction of being held so that his head was next to her ample tit, he enjoyed the sensation of having his pubes in contact with her side and the feeling of having her hand on his butt. As she walked, her natural feminine sway made the bones in her hip pushed rhythmically against his crotch, simulating the slow cadence that Howard used when he first mounted a woman to make love. His position on her hip was agreeably similar to some of the odd sexual maneuvers he had seen graphically depicted in the Kama Sutra. Howard sighed and lay his head against her breast, closing his eyes with a tiny contented rosebud smile on his lips. It wasn't the same as having sex with the lovely young woman, but it was as close as a man with a one-year-old body was going to get.
When they got to the kitchen, Rose reached around and grasped him with both hands on either side of his chest, then hoisted him over the tray of the high chair to ease him into its seat. Once she was sure he was comfortable, she stepped behind the high chair and snapped his soft plastic bib around his neck. Rose pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and turned it so it faced the high chair, then placed the feeding spoon on the tray in front of Bri-Bri while she unscrewed the lid from the baby food jar. Howard stared at the tiny blue latex-covered spoon in front of him in fascination. There was something about its appearance that was so intriguing that he couldn't tear his eyes away from it. Rose suddenly remembered the cooling bottle of formula and went to get it from the stove, leaving the jar and lid on the table. Seizing the opportunity, Howard grabbed the spoon to look at it more closely. The rubber coating on the spoon ended at the juncture of the handle and the bowl of the spoon. Howard puzzled over why he had never noticed the odd construction of the spoon before and idly wondered how the rubber would feel against the surface of his tongue. Without conscious volition, his nimble hands popped the spoon in his mouth to get the feel of the thing. The smooth rubber of the spoon felt wonderful in his mouth. He moved it from side-to-side, rubbing it on the inside of his cheeks and exploring the odd sensation of tonguing a soft spoon with absolutely no sharp edges on it. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the strange feelings the spoon gave him and never saw Rose return to her seat in front of the high chair.
Howard was jerked out of his reverie by Rose's exclamation, "No, no, Bri-Bri! Not for baby!"
She reached over the tray and grasped his hand, pulling the spoon out of his mouth as she said, "Give Rosie the spoon, Sweetie. Rosie doesn't want you to choke yourself on the spoon!"
Howard looked at her in shock and realized what he had just done. Without thinking about it, he had started mouthing and sucking on the spoon like a one-year-old. Howard was mortified. He was acting like an infant! Suddenly, Howard became aware of his surroundings and how he was dressed in front of the beautiful stranger. There he was, dressed in nothing but a diaper and feeding bib while sitting in a baby's high chair and he had to go and act like he hadn't a brain in his head. No wonder everyone treated him like an infant! He would have given his eyeteeth for the opportunity to fuck the comely young woman and the stupid infantile reflexes of his rejuvenated body had made him behave in a ridiculously infantine manner. It was enough to make a grown man cry. When Rose forcibly unwrapped his tiny fingers from the spoon's handle effortlessly, Howard became aware of just how weak and helpless he had become. Waves of frustration and anger washed over him, engulfing his conscious mind in emotion and drowning his self-control. Howard began to cry. When the high pitched wails reached his ears the infantile sound of his voice only made him more frustrated. Howard began kicking his legs in helpless rage at his circumstances and balled his fists in anger.
Rose smiled calmly and shook her head at Bri-Bri's temper tantrum as she ladled out a spoonful of mixed vegetables for him. Apparently, little Bri-Bri didn't like having his new toy taken away from him. Well, she knew how to calm him quickly enough; he was probably cranky because he was hungry. Once she got some food into him and gave him his bottle, he'd be alright. Since his mouth was already wide open, there was no reason to wait to feed him, she thought as she pushed the spoon in his mouth and dumped its contents under his tongue.
Howard's wails of anger stopped in mid-screech when he realized that she had put food in his mouth. He closed his jaw to swallow, but his slack lips and the unaccustomed position of the food under his tongue rather than on top of it made him lose most of the spoonful down his chin. Howard was horrified by the thought of how he must look to her. The humiliation of having food drip from his chin pulled Howard back to reality. What had happened to him? He had felt frustrated and suddenly he was having a temper tantrum like an infant. What had happened to his self-control? Seconds later, Rose dropped another spoonful in his mouth to join the first. Howard swallowed convulsively and opened his mouth for the next. There was no point in resisting his "babysitter", she'd just continue to feed him and he'd end up with food all over him. He let her feed him the rest of the jar without rancor and sat still when she wiped his face and hands with a warm wet washcloth. When she took the bottle and pushed the nipple in his mouth, he began crying again. Rose took the bottle and set it on the table for a moment, then pulled him up and out of the high chair to ride on her hip. Taking the bottle in her free hand, she took him back to the living room and sat on the couch.
Rose took care to arrange him in the crook of her arm so he was nearly flat and tried the bottle once more. This time, Howard's rational mind retained control and he allowed her to stick the nipple in his mouth so he could nurse. He tried to put his hands up to hold the bottle, but they were firmly and gently brushed away by Rose. Apparently, Rose thought that he was too young to be trusted to hold his own bottle. Within seconds, Howard's thirst and infantile reflexes took over and he was sucking on the bottle as hard as he could. He looked up around the bottle and gazed into Rose's loving eyes. Despite the embarrassment of being bottle fed like a baby, Howard was comfortable in her lap. It was easier to keep his short legs folded than it was to stretch them out so he let them stay folded over him, only occasionally waving them languidly while he suckled. The food and formula was making Howard sleepy. His eyelids drooped as he sucked while the blood vessels in his skin vasodilated, making him feel warm and cozy. Howard was surprised by how warm his crotch felt in particular. The warmth seemed to grow every minute, creeping across his behind until his entire bottom was wrapped in a comfy glow. Howard felt a small tingle of pleasure radiate from his perineum making him relax even more.
A faint smell wafted by Howard's nose and was drawn in his nostrils. Howard's eyes snapped open in immediate recognition of the aroma of baby poop. He had shit his diapers while sitting on Rose's lap!
"Oh God! Oh God, please no!", Howard thought in horror when he realized he had just shat while sitting on a gorgeous girl's lap.
The pleas of the planet wrecker went unanswered by his oft-neglected deity. Howard would have to deal with the consequences of his incontinent behavior on his own. Howard looked up at Rose with fear in his eyes. How would she react to his unseemly behavior? Would she scream at the ill-bred wretch who had the bad taste to eliminate his wastes in his pants while she cuddled him? Or would she dump him in his crib to weep in the darkness as a loathsome creature who was too much bother to change?
Rose smiled down at him maternally and said, "Rosie smells a dirty dydee, Sweetie! Is it yours? Poor little Honeybunny! Just as soon as you finish your bottle, Rosie is going to change you into a nice clean dydee! Would Bri-Bri like that?"
Howard gazed up thankfully at her as he lay in her lap. She hadn't gotten angry or castigated him for his failure. Truly she was heaven sent. Howard finished his bottle quickly, peeing continuously as he did so. He couldn't really tell from the sensations of his half-dead penis if he was urinating or not, but the renewed feeling of warmth as he emptied his bladder into his diaper was clue enough. He knew he was thoroughly soaking his diapers and prayed that they wouldn't begin to leak before she got around to changing him. Rosie was too nice a person for that to happen to her.
When the bubbles of air gurgled up through the nipple Rose knew he had finished his ba-ba. She wasn't surprised when he pooped in his dydee after his meal. Her weekend charges often did the same. She patted him on the back to bubble him, producing a prodigious belch that embarrassed Howard almost to the point of starting to cry again, then carried him back to the nursery and laid him on the changing pad on top of the dresser.
She saw the distressed expression on Howard's face as she prepared to change him and decided do lighten his mood before unfastening his diaper. He hadn't been sitting in a poopy dydee for long, she reasoned, so a few more minutes wouldn't make much difference. Rose grabbed one of his feet in her hand and began to tickle the sole with her other hand. Howard didn't want to laugh, but her tickling was irresistible. Within minutes, he had began to giggle uncontrollably as Rose switched to tickling his legs and sides, then finished by bending over and blowing a huge labial fricative onto the soft skin of his protuberant tummy. Howard didn't know that Anita had seen to it that Rose would treat him that way if he became depressed. On the sheet of instructions for his care that she had given Rose, Anita had specifically enjoined Rose to tickle Bri-Bri and blow Bronx cheers on his abdomen if he became moody. Once Rose had Bri-Bri chuckling merrily, she quickly unfastened the tapes of his diaper before he became aware that he was being changed. Seconds later, she had pulled the soggy diaper down between his legs and had crossed his ankles to lift his bottom free of the mess. A few quick but thorough swipes with the baby wipe and his bottom was clean. Rose removed the dirty diaper with one hand then lowered his naked body down to the plastic mat of the changing pad. Howard squirmed uncomfortably under the young woman's amused gaze, but the high friction of the plastic made his skin stick to its surface and prevented him from sliding sideways. Rose flipped him over on his stomach and began applying a thick coating of vaseline to the crack between his cheeks to prevent diaper rash. Howard's mood plummeted into mortification as she spread his cheeks and worked a finger-sized gob of lubricant into his anal region. This time he really was horny. The sensation of having his most secret place violated by the young woman's finger as she easily broached the weak muscle of his infant anus and slipped her finger into his bottom made his little penis become fully erect. Howard whimpered uncomfortably from the indignity of the procedure. Rose heard his small cry and stopped what she was doing. She wiped the excess vaseline from her fingers with a baby wipe and took a pacifier from the clear acrylic storage jar at the back of the changing station where Anita kept his pacifiers. Rose popped the pacifier in his mouth, saying, "Hush, Bubele! Such a tsimmes you're making! It's only a dydee change, Zeeskayt! It will all be over in a minute."
Then Rose applied a small shower of baby powder to his cute little bottom and rubbed the sweet smelling cornstarch into every fold of his behind before turning him on his back again. She crossed his ankles again, holding them in one hand as she raised him to slip a fresh disposable under his bottom. Then she dusted his crotch with a light coating of baby powder and began working it into his skin.
Rose grinned at the effects the dydee change were having on little Bri-Bri; his minuscule wee-wee was standing straight up. She smiled down at him and said playfully, "What a sweet shmekela you have, Zeeskayt!"
Rose wondered what he would be like when he grew up. The masculine look of his baby face told her that his tiny balls were already producing ample amounts of testosterone. Her mother had been friends with some of her classmate's mothers when they were babies and had told her that the jocks she knew at school had looked masculine even when they were infants. From what Rose had heard about the jocks from her friends, she imagined that by the time Bri-Bri was eighteen, he'd be hung like a horse and have turned into a real ladies' man. Pity the poor woman who married a man like that; she'd have a hard time keeping him from straying from the fold. Unless she found some way to keep him home and dependent on her, he'd be shtupping every woman he could bed.
When Howard groaned in embarrassment as she smiled at his erectile penis, Rose decided it was time to distract him again. She took his little balls between her fingers and tenderly massaged them for a few minutes. Howard's eyes grew wide as the sensations from his pubic area reached his brain. When she switched to his penis and began to slowly stroke it as if he was her boyfriend, Howard's mind went mad with desire. He sucked on the pacifier furiously in lust as she smiled down at her little charge with a grin of triumph on her beautiful face.
Since Howard was incapable of an orgasm, Rose's ministrations couldn't last forever. After about three minutes of playing with little Bri-Bri's tiny organ, she stopped abruptly and pulled the diaper up between his legs. Within second's, she had fastened the tapes on the sides of the diaper to make a snug fit and had picked him up to hold him in her arms.
Howard was so surprised by the shift from being sexually stimulated to being cuddled in her arms that his unbridaled passion made him grasp her breast in his hand compulsively in search of more stimulation. Rose laughed pleasantly at Bri-Bri's quest for the comforting nurture of a woman's breast and gently pulled his hand away as she turned to carry him back to the living room. Howard realized his mistake the minute she pulled his hand away from her tit, "What had possessed him to think she was sexually attracted to him? He was only a little baby in her eyes, nothing more."
As she walked him back to the living room, he began to understand what had happened. Somehow his infantile reflexes had become mixed with his adult desires and caused him to seek the solace at the site which had pleased him both as an infant and as a man. As a baby, he had instinctively grasped the object of his desire, but his adult mind knew better than to behave like that. Obviously, the cortical censor of his mind was losing its grip on his actions the longer he remained in an infant's body. Howard knew a woman had to be courted and properly prepared to allow herself to be groped. Unfortunately, his infantile reflexes made him reach out and take whatever his subconscious wanted without thinking about the consequences. Howard thought with dismay that after his precipitate behavior, she wouldn't give him another opportunity to touch her in that fashion again.
When they reached the living room, Rose put him in his playpen to amuse himself while she sat down on the end of the couch by the side table where the phone lay. She dialed a number and happily chatted with the person on the other end before giving Howard's address over the phone and inviting the other party to come over. Howard crouched on his hands and knees at the wall of mesh that separated him from freedom and wondered who she had invited. He wasn't concerned with being discovered as a man, but he did harbor grave concerns about the introduction of strangers into his presence. As Rose closed the call, Howard speculated on whether his trepidations were driven by the same fears a small child had when they were introduced to strangers. It was their sense of being helpless and unable to protect oneself that made infants so fearful, he conjectured. Certainly, he felt much the same concerns himself. If he could've spoken, he'd have told Rose that her guest was unwelcome in his house of woe. It was regrettable he was limited to the anguished whimpers of infancy. The loss of his ability to speak had left him powerless to object to the social arrangements of his caretakers.
After a boring half-hour of sitting in his playpen and trying to watch videos of the latest creations of the paragons of youth-oriented music through the obscuring mesh, the doorbell rang. Rose answered the door and ushered in a well-muscled young man of approximately eighteen years. Rose sat him on the couch and went to the kitchen to get a couple of soft drinks for them. Once they had gotten settled, Rose rested her head on the young man's shoulder while they talked quietly. The teenaged boy responded by putting his arm around her shoulder and drawing her closer to him. It was obvious to Howard that the boy would soon begin making his moves on her as he would have had he been in the boy's place. A few loving kisses on Rose's forehead by her boyfriend and then he worked his way down to her waiting lips. After a long breathless French kiss, he nuzzled her behind her ear, then bit her earlobes playfully. Howard could see the young man's efforts were having a profound effect on Rose. She moaned quietly in pleasure and wrapped her legs around his, then grabbed the boy's face between her two hands and kissed him passionately. This was the signal the boy had been waiting for. His hands silently crept up to her blouse and began unbutto ning her from the neck down. Apparently Rose was in full agreement with his intentions because she dropped one hand and dexterously began unfastening his shirt with just one hand as she caressed the side of his face with the other and continued to kiss him. Within minutes, their upper garments hung loosely about them as they continued to caress and kiss each other in a passionate embrace. Rose made the final move by unbuttoning the boy's jeans and loosening them so that his briefs were exposed. The prominent bulge in the young man's white cotton Fruit-of-the-Looms made it apparent what his intentions were.
Howard watched in fascination as the post-adolescent theatre of early adult sexuality played out in front of him. Howard noted that the boy's actions lacked the grace of experience, but there was no questioning his desire for his girlfriend. He in turn unsnapped the front of her jeans and spread the zipper wide with his fingers, groping for the treasure that lay hidden beneath the frilly pink panties that Rose wore. Rose slipped her hand behind the lad and pushed his pants down to the couch cushion, then began tugging them down her boyfriend's legs in a odd parody of undressing an overgrown child. When the boy's pants fell to his ankles, he reciprocated by doing the same to her, albeit in a less graceful and more clumsy fashion than the way in which her elegant maneuver had been executed. The two of them kicked off their shoes and jeans without breaking their kiss, then shrugged their way out of their upper garments as they continued to embrace and pet each other in an ecstasy of carnal desire. Howard was spellbound as he watched the young man unfasten her bra while hugging her, then helped her dispose of the unwanted bit of cloth. Both Rose and her young paramour were only dressed in their underwear now, making Howard wish he was on the couch with them to take advantage of the opportunity. Rose's breasts were magnificent. They stood out perkily as her nipples hardened with passion. Howard's little penis became hard with desire and he drooled continuously on the plastic mat of the playpen as Rose's boyfriend began massaging her crotch.
Howard waited for the culmination of the events unfolding before him with the anticipation of a gourmet lecher. He didn't have long to wait. The two of them slipped out of their underwear with the ease of a pair of two-year-olds going out on an unauthorized romp away from their mothers. As the boy put his hand down to her crotch to begin fingering her, Howard loosed a soft "Gaaaaa" of involuntary pleasure at the sight. All at once, the boy realized he had an audience and stopped cold. He took his hands off Rose and whispered desperately, "Rose! We can't do it here! There's a little boy in the playpen watching us!"
"Nu? Don't be silly, David," Rose said with the huskiness of intense sexual arousal, "He's only a little baby! He doesn't have the faintest idea of what we're doing."
She winked at her boyfriend and said conspiratorially, "Even if he did understand, he can't tell his mommy about us. He's too young to talk!"
Rose rubbed the inside of his thigh with her hand and said in a silky voice, "Forget about him, Lover. Let me show you something I've being thinking about doing for you for a long time."
With that Rose dropped to her knees in front of him and engulfed his penis in her mouth. David shuddered as she worked her way up and down his member, pausing each time she reached the end and giving him a tiny kiss on the end of his penis. David went wild. He squirmed like a baby boy getting a diaper change from a maiden aunt. His face turned red with lust and the muscles of his legs went rigid in the throes of passion. Just before he orgasmed, Rose stopped and lay down on the carpet between the playpen and the couch. "Take me, David! Take me, now!", Rose demanded breathlessly.
Howard watched in awe as the well-endowed boy knelt between Rose's widely spread legs and fumbled to enter her. A twinge of jealousy rose up in him as he realized that he wanted to be the one to deflower the maiden so invitingly laid out on the carpet before him. The boy entered her and thrust twice quickly and moaned in pleasure. Howard wanted to moan too. The crotch of his diaper felt hot and his penis was as erect as the young man's. The only difference between Howard's lust and the young man's was scale. Howard's infant body wouldn't have been able to tickle Rose, much less enter her. Nonetheless, his passion made waves of pleasure thrill through his body as if he was the one who was fucking her rather than her boyfriend. When the boy's thighs went rigid in orgasm, Howard felt a similar sensation as his entire crotch became warm and waves of pleasure came up from his pubic area.
Both Howard and David sighed in contentment as their passions were expended. Rose sighed too, but for a different reason. She shouldn't have gone down on David like that. He had a bad enough problem with premature ejaculation without over stimulating him. The fellatio had brought him to the brink of orgasm and left him teetering on the edge. She had gotten used to Quickie sex with him, but only two thrusts? She was just getting started when he had shot his wad. "Oh, well," she thought to herself, "We'll wait half an hour and try again. Maybe his need for me won't be so...'urgent' next time."
Rose's disappointed musings were interrupted by David saying, "Rose, what's that smell?"
Rose sniffed and muttered under her breath tiredly in Yiddish, "Oy! Can't we ever have any peace?" Then in a louder voice she said to David, "The baby's pooped in his diaper again. Get off of me, David. I need to change him."
David rolled off her body and lay on the floor while she bent over the playpen to pick up Bri-Bri. She held him to her naked bosom with one hand while she pulled open the back of his diaper to peek inside. She chuckled and said down to David, "It looks like the two of you dumped your loads at the same time. I'll bet little Bri-Bri enjoyed himself every bit as much as you did, David!"
David looked incredulous and replied doubtfully, "Are you telling me he 'came' too?"
Rose laughed and said, "Of course not silly! Babies can't orgasm! I mean he pooped in his diaper."
David looked shocked and said, "Do you mean they ENJOY shitting in their pants?"
Rose rolled her eyes up to the heavens as if expecting some divine intervention to cure her boyfriend's innocence. She commented in an aside to herself under her breath, "Voden?" Then she dropped her eyes to David and said directly, "Of course, Silly! What other pleasures do they have? Other than sucking on their bottles and making messes in their dydees, babies' brains aren't mature enough to have anything other than the most primitive physical pleasures," Rose told him patronizingly.
"I can't believe it," David insisted, "How could they like something so disgusting?"
"You enjoyed making messes in your pants too, when you were his age," Rose replied, "Besides, it's not disgusting when a little baby makes a poo-poo in his dydee. They can't help themselves. They may not even know when they're doing it."
"I thought you said he enjoyed it and now you're telling me that he didn't know he did it. That doesn't make sense!", David exclaimed.
"If he makes a little poopy he may not be aware of it, but if he dumps a big load, you can be sure he feels it. By the size of the mess in this little baby's diaper, I'd say he enjoyed himself...immensely!", Rose laughed.
"Would you like to see?", Rose offered, turning around so the baby's bottom was facing David and bending down so she could open the back of the diaper for him to look inside.
"No thanks!", David answered in disgust as he got up from the carpet to evade the reek of the open diaper.
David trailed behind as Rose carried little Bri-Bri to the nursery to change his stinky dydee. She laid him down on the changing pad on the dresser and pulled the tapes open on the sides of his diaper. it wasn't until she pulled the diaper away from his abdomen and down between his legs that the stench of Bri-Bri's bowel movement became overpowering. David backed off in haste, trying to evade the unhealthy miasma that threatened to engulf him. Bri-Bri's bottom was covered in the soft poop of infancy. David looked at the poop and asked, "Is he sick? It looks like he has diarrhea!"
"No, David," Rose chuckled, "Baby poop always looks like this. Their diet of fruits and vegetables makes their poop very soft. If you ate like nothing but fruits and vegetables and washed it down with formula, your poop would look like this too!"
David made a moue of distaste at her suggestion. Rose laughed merrily and said, "You'll have to do better than that if you expect to be a father some day, David! You're old enough to get married now, David. You've graduated High School and are going to college this fall. It's high time you learned to take responsibility. Do you want to be a hameshe all your life? The days of the Temple of Solomon are over, Boytchik! Women expect men to help them with the children today. And that means changing diapers!"
She wiped Bri-Bri's little tush clean and said, "Look at him, David! How can you be repelled by a sweet little baby like this?"
Rose turned him over on his stomach and carefully put a coating of vaseline on Howard's bottom, saying, "Just look at his little tuchis, David. Did you ever see anything so sweet and adorable in your life? I know he makes stinks in his dydees, but that's the way babies are. He's only a pitsele! There's nothing wrong in that! Doesn't Torah command us to be fruitful and multiply? How can we do that if we can't stand being around a sweet little baby?"
Rose powdered Bri-Bri's bottom and flipped him over on his back again. She raised his feet, put a diaper beneath his bottom and said, "Here, David! I've done the hard part. Now you show me you know how to fasten a diaper on a baby!"
David edged closer and looked at the infant laying on the dresser in front of him. Howard had gotten over his embarrassment at having Rose change him, but when he looked up into David's eyes and saw the unmitigated horror in the young man's eyes, he wanted to scream in humiliation.
David looked at Bri-Bri incredulously and said, "Is there something wrong with him? His dick is so tiny and...wh..where are his balls? Has he been castrated?"
"No Silly," Rose said patiently, "He's a little baby and they haven't gotten big yet. At this stage in his life, they're only about the size of large peas." Then she stopped in mid-speech and said with a gimlet eye, "You're an only child, aren't you David?"
"W..Well...yes," admitted David hesitantly.
"If you had had little brothers or sisters you would have seen how babies look before. Come on over and diaper little Bri-Bri. There's nothing difficult or wrong about diapering a baby. It's a useful thing to know how to do. When adults get old, they sometimes have to wear diapers too! To be ill or young is no shande!" Rose said. She chuckled and added with a smirk, "Women tend to be less feeble in their old age than men. Women also don't have prostates to give them urinary problems. If we get married and grow old together, there might be a time when you get so incontinent that I'll have to put you back in diapers! Just think, in forty or fifty years that could be you laying there on the changing pad!"
"Rose!", David burst out indignantly as his cheeks blushed red in response to the humiliating mental images she had evoked.
Rose laughed and said, "Come on, Loverboy! I was only kidding! I was only trying to get you to see how natural diapers are. If a person is too young or ill to control themselves, what else can they wear? There's nothing shameful about diapers. Come over here and powder little Bri-Bri's front and tape his diaper down. That's all you have to do. Come on, the baby can't wait all day!"
David came over hesitantly as if he was reluctant to touch something that had produced such filth a few minutes before. Rose grabbed him by the hand and led him to the dresser where she put the container of baby powder in his hand. "There," she said, closing his hand around the powder, "Just give him a light dusting on the crotch."
Rose watched as David sprinkled a heavy coat of powder over Bri-Bri's pubes and said, "Stop! That's more than enough! Now you'll have to rub it in!"
"Rub it in?", David quailed.
"You put too much powder on him and now you'll have to rub it in," Rose said patiently as if she was teaching a small boy how to tie his shoes.
David put two fingers together and began to massage Bri-Bri's inner thighs. Howard grew wide-eyed as he felt the young man's fingers make circular motions on the sensitive skin of his groin. He squirmed a little under David's touch. It was only thing to have a beautiful girl change his diapers, but it was quite another to have a teenaged boy's hand in his crotch. What did they think he was, some kind of pervert?
Rose nodded her approval and said, "Rub it into his penis and balls, David! Don't worry, he won't bite you." She laughed and added, "After all, babies don't have any teeth!"
David took Bri-Bri's little balls between his fingers and began rubbing them, making Howard writhe in embarrassment as he felt himself being involuntarily stimulated. David's eyes widened as he saw Bri-Bri's tiny penis begin to engorge with blood and get hard under his touch.
"H..He's getting a hard-on!", David stammered in shock, "Is he some kind of queer?"
Howard flailed his arms and legs helplessly in mortification at his tumescent state. David's remark had hit a nerve and made him wonder if his sexuality had been affected when he was rejuvenated. Although he hadn't lost his attraction for women's boobs, there was no denying the obvious evidence that he took pleasure from David's touch; his entire crotch was tingling from David's gentle finger massage. When he opened his mouth to scream, Rose silenced his inarticulate protests by gagging him with a pacifier. Rose smiled at David and said, "Baby boys often get aroused when their diapers are changed. It's just a physical thing, David. It doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. They scream a lot too. That's why most mothers put pacifiers close to their babies' changing stations. You can go ahead and fasten his diaper, the powder is rubbed in now."
David nodded and drew the diaper up between Bri-Bri's legs as he sucked on his pacifier and stared up at David with a look of dark rage brooding silently behind his blue eyes. A minute later, his pubes were safely ensconced in a clean diaper. Rose watched David finish diapering Bri-Bri with approval, then moved him aside so she could search the dresser to find something appropriate for Bri-Bri to wear while he slept. She went through the drawers one-by-one until she found the Bri-Bri's nightwear in the bottom of the dresser. It was a little too warm that evening to put the baby in a sleeper, she thought to herself as she discarded the fleecy blue sleeper in her hand and picked up a white cotton onesie from the stack in the drawer. Rose straightened up and sat Bri-Bri up on the changing pad. Then she gathered the front and back of the long T-shirt in her hands and tugged it down over his head, working his little hands through the short sleeves before pulling it down to his diaper. She lay Bri-Bri on his back again and lifted his legs as she drew the flap of the onesie up between his legs and fastened the snaps to the front. Then she carried him out to the living room while David brought up the rear.