The kids were THRILLED when our elf Zippy returned on December 1st. This year Zippy got a little more mischievous and kept us pretty entertained with all of the things we caught him doing. A few of the kids' favorites were when he was in our printer making copies of himself, when he got sick with the rest of our family, and when he was suctioning Ellie's trach bear.
By far the greatest surprise was the morning we were leaving for Utah and the kids searched and searched the house to say goodbye to Zippy before we left, but they couldn't find him anywhere. A little disappointed, we got in the car only to find that he had jumped in our car the night before so he could come along on our trip to Utah and stay with us until Christmas.
While in Utah we experienced a little bit of drama surrounding our dear elf. One day Uncle Beetle clumsily bumped into our elf who was hanging from the light and then jokingly announced, "The magic is gone!" (if you touch your elf they will loose their magic). Brynn was DEVASTATED and was instantly sobbing uncontrollably. She loves Zippy so so much and the thought that he would loose his magic and never come back was more than her tender little heart could handle. It took Brandon making an emergency call to Santa to explain it was he who had accidentally bumped into Zippy and to please not let him loose his magic because of it and a lot of reassuring to get her to calm down. The next day we found Zippy and all was well.....until the week after Christmas. You see the elves return to the North Pole on Christmas Eve and we don't see them again until next December. So you can imagine Brynn's surprise when on December 31 she was looking for something in our room and decided it was probably in the box that was tucked away on the top shelf of the bookcase with several other things piled on top of and around it, only to pull it down and open it to find....an elf. Or as she walked upstairs and sadly told Grandma, "I found a dead elf in a box". She quickly started running through several possible scenarios with my mom including what she feared the most, that maybe when Zippy was flying home to the North Pole on Christmas Eve he lost his magic from when Brandon touched him and he fell in the street and someone scooped him up in a box and mailed him to us (it was an amazon box she found him in, so naturally it had to have been mailed to us). My mom tried her best to counter Brynn's concerns by saying maybe Zippy just got really tired and fell asleep in a box. After a surprisingly long absence from the conversation, Scott and I came to hear Brynn's story. We had her take us to show us the box. Sure enough there was an elf that looked like Zippy inside, but there was something else that Brynn hadn't seen before...a note. We pulled out the note (which appeared to be hastily written) and read it. It was from Santa telling us that this little elf had been waiting all year to be adopted by a family, but hadn't found a family yet. Zippy had told Santa what a nice family we were and so he wondered if we would adopt this elf. I've never seen more excited kids as I saw when my kids realized this meant next year we would have not one but TWO elves at our house. YAY! We named our new elf Bella which activated her magic so she could return to the north pole with all of the other elves until next Christmas. We can hardly wait for next December!!
