something is burning!

I woke up at 1:30am and smelled something burning... a plastic burning type smell... I woke Ryan up and he smelled it too and went downstairs to check. I had used my wood burner and glue-gun yesterday and I thought I must have left one plugged in, but was pretty sure I'd put them away. Ryan came up and said I hadn't left anything out, but we could definitely smell something. It was pretty strong and I hoped it was coming from outside, but no such luck. I started thinking things like, "what if Cooper found my glue-gun and has it plugged in some weird random place" Luckily I checked my cupboard of craft things and all were accounted for. We checked the garage, outlets, stove, microwave, toaster, the kids bedrooms, furnace, fireplace... we were completely stumped! I was getting nervous we were breathing these unknown toxic fumes... what about the babies... we can't go back to sleep until we figured it out! We opened windows sat for a minute racking our brains and then I went to good ole Google to see what I could find. And sure enough I typed in "smells like something is burning in my house, but I can't find the source" and some wonderful guy named Jim made a comment on some site last February that included..."Kitchen suspects are a plastic lid in the bottom of the dishwasher." I went straight to the dishwasher (that I had started at about 10pm last night), opened it up and immediately knew I'd found the source... the smell was awful! This was the culprit...

It had fallen off the rack and had been burnt up- I guess on the heating coil thing in the bottom. I was SO relieved that I found the source (thanks to Google and Jim of course) and that the burnt bottle nipple was the extent of the damage. We kept windows open to air out the house and were finally able to go back to bed.