I walked into my youngest daughter's room last night, and it smelled like something was burning! I was a bit alarmed but trying not to panic. I didn't see anything burning, and her room was quite messy, so I was moving things around, looking under toys, looking under the bed, etc. I walked around and felt all the walls knowing that sometimes electrical fires start in walls. Thankfully none of the walls were hot, so we concluded that wasn't the problem. I told my oldest daughter to quickly get daddy. My hubby was definitely the better investigator. He started picking up and all the toys and smelling them. He said that some of the toys were actually hot! He began opening them up with a screw driver (fortunately for our kids, most battery operated toys are now "baby proof"). Some of the batteries were actually leaking!

Our daughter is two, and as you can imagine, she has way too many battery operated toys. They included a Weeble House, a school bus, a flashlight, a Dora piano, a Disney Princess mirror, and on and on. Some were big. Some were small, but they all had batteries.

She even had two inexpensive dolls whose hair smelled like turpentine!

Needless to say, we took out all the batteries and threw away any dolls who smelled like chemicals.

Be careful to limit how many battery operated toys you allow your kids to have, and recycle the batteries every few months to prevent a bigger problem!