Liar, Liar, Nothing's On Fire

I haven't posted much lately, I know. i have excuses: I was out of town for about a week and a half, and since I got home Quin has been gone quite a lot leaving me with lots of solo Maren duty, and it's hard to get much done around her with her running wild.

Long night for us last night. At a little after 4 a.m. the smoke alarm went off. Quin and I literally leapt from the bed--if I could see it on camera, it was probably really comical. I think that was actually the first time I've even heard the smoke alarm since we moved into this house 2 years ago, but it is unmistakeable. No danger of sleeping through that one, no sirree. Once we shook off the terror of being woken by a loud, high-pitched screech, we checked all around the house for signs of smoke or fire. We found nothing.

Remarkably, Maren slept through the whole thing. I went in to check on her and found her diaper and jammies, soaked through, so I decided to risk waking her up to change her. She woke up, but quickly fell back asleep once I sat down in the rocker and snuggled her. While I was sitting there, trying to calm myself down enough to go back to sleep, the smoke alarm went off again--twice! Each time (just like the first two times) it only rang for about 5 seconds, but long enough to jolt both Quin and me out of drowsiness. I put Maren in her bed and went looking around and even outside the house, again, for anything amiss. Nothing, thankfully, but at that point I was completely paranoid that there was a fire smoldering somewhere we couldn't see. I think if there truly had been smoke the alarm would have kept ringing, instead of just yelling at us for a minute and then going silent. All of the smoke alarms in our house are wired together and run off of electricity (with battery backups) so the only thing I can figure is that it might be an electrical short of some kind, and I have no idea how we're going to fix that.

After the second round of alarms, I went in to check on Maren again. She woke up again, and Quin took her and laid in our bed with her in his arms. I got her a bottle and blankie and she thrashed around for a while, sucking noisily, until I'd had enough and took her to her own bed. By this point it was well after 5 a.m. I finally managed to fall asleep sometime after that, and was unpleasantly awakened AGAIN by the smoke alarm at just before 7 a.m. It stayed quiet all day until about an hour ago, when it went off yet again. Ugh. Now I'm worried that we're going to have a repeat performance of last night's shenanigans. Tomorrow we'll call the Fire Department and see if they have any idea what's going on. It's a long shot, but we don't know what else to do. If any of you have suggestions or insight, please feel free to leave a comment! I don't think I can handle many more nights like last night.