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!