What do you do when your newly adopted child thinks she is Picasso only she uses feces for her art work? Probably my first encounter with feces art may have been the worst. Honestly I just wasn’t prepared, it was so totally unexpected. I was an unseasoned foster parent back then. We had only had four foster children placed with us before she arrived.

It was early morning and I was going from bedroom to bedroom waking up the children for school. I ran into the laundry room to start a load of laundry. You know, when you have eight children, laundry is an all day affair. Anyway, I opened the laundry room door and there it was. Beautiful brown swirls, with the occasional little clump spread all over the wall, the toilet, and the vacuum cleaner. By the way, the wall is white textured plaster. The smell was as pleasant as the art work. If your house is anything like mine, you know who did it, yep, nobody.

Our little Picasso wasn’t about to own up to her masterpiece. She was dressed for school and eating her breakfast just like it was any other day. I guess that was another of the more shocking things to me. It had no effect on her. She hadn’t bothered to shower, and it hadn’t affected her appetite in the least.

I called the psychologist she had been seeing in near hysterics. He just calmly said, “Well, did you make her clean it up.” Perhaps this was my first clue that this was a relatively common phenomenon among older child adoption. So I ranted and raved and sent her into the bathroom with a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush and told her to clean it all up. I’m sure I added something like, and you better not leave a speck of it behind.

The next shock came after she had finished scrubbing the wall clean. She calmly asked me if she could now finish her breakfast. I was, as you can imagine, completely sick to my stomach. How could you scrub all that up, and then want to finish eating? Well I did let her finish her breakfast, but then I insisted that she take a shower and put on new clothes.

Unfortunately this wasn’t an isolated incident. I have several more episodes to share with you. The good news is, she did finally grow out of it.