Mummies and Chickens, Oh my!

This week we started what is without a doubt the most anticipated project so far: the chicken mummy.  My boys are having a blast with the mummies, and I often find them reading one of our many books about mummies (Magic Tree House, Tut's Mummy, and too many others to mention!). 

For our mummy, I decided to use a cornish hen.  This was mainly to keep it a smaller project and make it more manageable with the amount of salt, baking soda, and baking powder we are going to be using throughout this project.  Yesterday we washed and dried our hen, then we rinsed it well with rubbing alcohol and dried it again.

Here are the boys reading the instructions and the hen wrapped in paper towel.

We filled a large plastic (zip-close) bag halfway with the mixture of salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon (to make it smell nice), put the hen in the bag, and then added the rest of the salt mixture.  The salt mixture is to try to get the salt closer to the acidic Natron salt that was used by the ancient Egyptians. I've read that you can also using washing soda.  We sealed the bag, and put it inside another large bag.

Today we checked our mummy and changed the salt mixture, as a lot of moisture had been absorbed into the powder.  This is what our mummy looked like when we brushed off the excess salt mixture.

The only thing we smelled was the cinnamon.  So far, this project has been a lot easier than I expected.  We will check on our mummy again in a couple of days and probably change the salt mixture again at that time.