Theodore played with Baby John John for a few minutes, then turned on the TV to Nickelodeon and sat down to watch with Baby John John in his lap.
Rugrats was on and they watched an episode titled “Regarding Stuie”.
Theodore settled Baby John Johns’s pacifier in his mouth while he indulged himself in his secret pastime; sucking his thumb.
He had always enjoyed sucking his thumb and had been very upset when he was five and his mother made him stop.
He had never told her that he hadn’t really stopped, only learned to hide it from everyone.
He only sucked his thumb when he was sure he wouldn’t get caught.
Oh, sure his mother had seen him a couple of times with his thumb in his mouth,
However, he was always able to explain it away as some injury he had done to himself or something he had spilled on his fingers.
He’d take the thumb out of his mouth and hold it in his hand and say that he had mashed it in the door or something.
Last year, when he was in the kitchen making toast, she caught him with his thumb in his mouth and he had taken it out and put the rest of his fingers in his mouth one by one, licking them as he withdrew them from his mouth.
He lied with perfect aplomb, telling her that he had spilled jam on his hand.
He was sure that she believed him.
It was always easier to believe a lie that was rational than an uncomfortable truth.
She simply did not want to believe her thirteen-year-old son still sucked his thumb.
Theodore looked at Baby John Johncontentedly sucking on his pacifier and wondered if it was as satisfying for Baby John John as sucking his thumb was for him.
The cartoon started and soon the two of them were engrossed in the story.
As the cartoon unfolded, Sidney, Tarquin’s father, went up on the roof to install an electronic weather ‘goose’ and fell.
Sidney hit his head and regressed back into babyhood.
He spends the day toddling around the house in diapers like his infant son Tarquin.
Theodore wondered what it would be like to regress into a baby again.
He knew what wearing a wet diaper felt like now.
Theodore reflected that it was kind of fun, once he got over the humiliation of being diapered.
He wondered how its formula tasted and what sucking a baby bottle felt like.
Of course, now that he lived in a house with a baby there’d be plenty of opportunities to find out.
The episode ended and a new episode was beginning when he felt something warm and wet in his lower parts.
“Oh no!”, he thought in horror, “Now I’m wetting my pants during the day!”
He moved Baby John John aside and was relieved to discover that Baby John John’s diaper had been leaking.