One mum has been forced to get creative after she spotted her son's mischievous Elf toy had lost a limb just one day after she gave it to her four-year-old.
Lauren Weir, 30, from Watford opted to give her son, Tommy, his Elf on a Shelf toy on December 1.
However, shortly after giving him the toy she noticed that one of the legs had mysteriously disappeared and could not be seen anywhere.
She said: "I completely panicked. It was only day one and he was already so in love, I was like 'oh my god what am I going to do'. I didn't have time to go out and get another one.
"If I didn't fix it I knew he'd be devastated but I knew if it lost a leg he'd just accept it - but it needed to have a story about why it was gone."
Earlier that day she had been at her neighbour's house with youngest son Tate and thought the leg might have got lost there.
"I'm praying that the leg doesn't turn up because then I'm really going to have to wrack my brain to cover that up somehow," she said.
In the dizzying stress she then felt to fix her kid's beloved toy, Lauren decided to get creative and came up with a master plan to cover the limb's disappearance.
She staged it as a dinosaur attack using some of her boy's toys from his room and told him that the nasty beasts had eaten the leg off the elf in an attack, leaving him with just one leg.
After hearing this chaotic scene, Tommy grew worried as to how his elf was going to get around so the mum suggested she would 'put a call into Santa' and the next day the elf had been given a toy wheelchair.
But after this stressful scenario, the mum says this elf is "taking over my life."
She said: "I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of something had eaten it and we have a copious amount of dinosaur toys so I picked out a couple of meat-eaters and set them up.
"He was so excited when he came downstairs the next day, he was like 'where's his leg?'. I was like 'the dinosaurs must have eaten it!' He thinks it's great that his elf survived this dinosaur attack.
"He was like 'those naughty dinosaurs!' and then he and Iron Man together were beating the dinosaurs up, which was quite amusing."
Next year the mum wants to get her other son an elf toy as well so the two can play with them together.
The team at Elf on The Shelf reached out to The Mirror to clarify that the elves used here aren't from the official brand, but they have contacted Lauren to offer her son an official Elf on the Shelf toy.
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