Don't freak out yet. They're not that bad sometimes. :) Are you in the country or city? In the city it can be harder. Every time you open up a wall or hole, put in large amounts of boric acid. You can puff it through cracks with a turkey baster. They get their toes in it and wash themselves and get sick and die. It lasts forever and if you put it behind walls and under cabinets, nobody who is supposed to be in your house will get into it. Also, check with your local ag extension service--they may have suggestions for your particular area. And remember, those egg cases could be 50 years old and the cockroaches may be long gone.

Just looked at a house where there were outlets in the ceiling corners of almost every room in the house. The house was built in 1979, but has been heavily remodeled. Some of the outlets were in the new rooms, but many of the original rooms also had the plugs. It was a mystery to me, as well. I thought about Christmas or decorative lighting of some type, but it just doesn't make sense that they would be in EVERY corner of almost every room. I also wondered about some type of speaker system, but it didn't seem appropriate to have speakers in ALL those rooms and there were no other panels for speaker wires. Has anybody figured out what somebody would want to have those ceiling plugs for?

Spend the 38 cents that a new outlet costs and just replace it. Even if there is no damage you can use for a teaching moment as you can have your daughter replace it not just financially but physically. She is at the age where she can handle it with some guidance and it is a good thing for her to know how to do. In 5 short years roughly she will be off on her own and it is something that is very handy to know how to do safely otherwise a 38 cent outlet becomes a $50.38 when you have an electrician come do it and he charges for an hour of labor. Who knows she might find it interesting enough to pursue it as a career someday.

"Only the breaker would, if enough total current was passing." Well, sort of. Just to dispel any possible confusion: A GFI breaker implements two functions. The first is overcurrent protection. The breaker trips if the total current drawn from the circuit exceeds the breaker's rating. For branch circuits this is normally 15 or 20 amps. The more it exceeds the breaker's rating, the faster the breaker trips. The second is ground fault protection. The breaker trips if it detects that the current is asymmetrical across the power line. The amount of asymmetrical (ground fault) current that trips the GFI part of the breaker is MUCH lower than the current that trips the overcurrent part . (Confused yet?) To explain this second function: it's not 100% accurate to describe it this way, but it's easier (I hope) to understand if you think of the electricity as going out the hot side of the receptacle and coming back in the neutral side. The GFI monitors both of these. If the amount of current coming back is less than the amount going out, some of it must be "leaking" to ground. That leakage might be going through a person or animal, risking shock or electrocution. So when the GFI sees that, it instantly opens, shutting off the power. With most GFIs, an imbalance (fault current) of 5 milliamps (0.005 amps) is enough to cause a trip.