Lesson At The Museum

The kids and I went to The Museum of Nature and Science with some friends this past weekend. We had a BLAST! The IMAX movie on The Grand Canyon was awesome. But, what taught everyone the best lesson had to be the Egyptian Mummies.

We spent quite a while with the mummies . . . because they’re COOL! They had two “real live” mummies in there. They were labeled and there was a board comparing the two . . . a Rich Woman’s Mummy and a Poor Woman’s Mummy. The boards pointed out how they knew one was rich and one was poor . . . the rich woman had her brain removed and organs removed and packed in linen and put back inside of her before she was wrapped up. She also had some metal objects packed in with her for the afterlife (could see them on the CT scan they had performed). The poor woman had all of her organs intact inside of her body and hadn’t been sent with anything “special” to help her in her journey through the afterlife.

Dude and I had a talk about this later that evening. After we got past a very rudimentary discussion of what the “afterlife” was all about, he wondered why the rich woman would be better off? Wouldn’t the poor woman be better off because she had her brain to think with and her heart to keep her alive? Why would anyone pay to have their brain sucked out through their nose, anyway? Why did only the rich people get their brains sucked out and their other organs wrapped up special? Shouldn’t everyone have that done if it would help them later? Why didn’t the rich woman’s family help pay for the poor woman to be a mummy so she could have a good afterlife, too? It’s not fair.

Lots of questions. In the end, his 8 year old brain came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter how they were mummified because they were both here, in the same museum, right next to each other with us looking at them, and WE couldn’t tell the difference. Maybe they couldn’t tell the difference in the afterlife, either, and the poor woman with the brian would do just fine.

I love how 8 year olds think.