Who needs a maid when you've got kids?

Balloons, hoola-hoops, free candy, and exuberant amounts of under-aged lipstick and mascara; it could only be the Thai national holiday of Children’s Day. It’s a day just for kids,in which local businesses and schools set up booths where they hold games, contests and activities for all the kids of the town. Dressed in brightly colored and often matching outfits, kids were singing songs, dancing, painting pictures outside the lines with inadvertently abstract colors, screaming, running, basically doing everything and anything they wanted. It was a day all to themselves, where a kid could just be a kid. And then there was a fetus in a jar.

We walked around for a while, watching contests we didn’t understand and laughing at kids we didn’t know. There was a hoola-hoop contest with no winners, no losers, just some stylish hoola-tricks and really loud, obnoxious Thai music. It was, quite literally, all fun and games, until the jar showed up. With a tiny white baby in it. Why? Why did it have to be there?

Was it a warning? Don’t be a bad kid or we’ll shrink you and stick you into a jar of some off-color liquid and make an example out of you: this is what happens to bad children.

Or was it teaching science? This, kids, is the miracle of where babies actually come from: large mason jars. No more silly stork stories, babies are grown in dishes and then stuck in jars until they hatch. The clever ones actually find ways to unscrew the lid from the inside. But either way, it’s not gross because that’s where we all came from and now that it’s Children’s Day, you ought to know that.

Really, I suppose it was teaching them about science, about where babies come from, or, at least what they look like at a very young age. One aspect of culture shock here in Thailand is how early kids are subjected to mature subjects or adult responsiblities that we Americans protect our children from. Mon and Min at home cook with mom, using large knives, cooking on open fires and frying up meat, all at the age of 9 and 10. They also watch the news and see newspapers, on which they are exposed to ghastly murders and graphic motorcycle crashes.

What’s strange is that all of this exposure appears to be for the best. The kids are perfectly able to cook and actually enjoy preparing an entire meal for the family, nearly entirely unsupervised. They do so without setting the kitchen on fire, cutting themselves, or even burning the food. The exposure to violence, or at least the bloody and gruesome results of violence, brings only sympathy out of the kids.

What all this means about our culture and us being overprotective of our children, I’m not sure, but I have learned that the kids here are just as good at work as they are at play. They help around the house without complaining, usually enjoying cooking or cutting bits of chicken with a large butcher knife. The adult chores and mature subjects they learn early are just a part of life out here. Why that means it’s a good idea to have a fetus at Children’s Day, I’m not sure but most of the kids just stared it at for a quick second before running to another booth to sing another song or play another game.