Advent 2013 days fifteen and sixteen

It's now Christmas Eve (6:00 a.m. as I start writing this, but not sure when I'll finish and post!) and I haven't updated on our Advent calendar since the 14th. Amazingly, we've managed to do all of them up to now, although several of them didn't happen on the originally scheduled days nor in the originally planned order.

...and 20 minutes later, I have my first excuse as to why I hadn't updated yet! First of all, it takes my computer awhile to turn on, and once it's on, another several minutes until it's willing to accept the memory card from the camera. Then I copied and pasted all of the photos from the last ten days (a ridiculous number of photos, thanks to the digital age) into my "December 2013, unedited" file, next I opened Picasa and chose all the ones that had to do with the Advent calendar and put them in their own file. I haven't done any editing (cropping, red-eye correction, straightening, color contrast, etc.), and now it's nearly time for me to leave on my walk, especially as it will take another several minutes to turn the computer back off. So for now, I'll just post two photos:

Day fifteen, December 15th

...not that we did this on Sunday, the 15th, because the only moment of the entire day when all of us were home AND awake at the same time was after 8:00 p.m., when we'd just gotten home and needed to put grumpy children to bed. Within ten minutes of getting home, Helen and Elisabeth were asleep and Katie and Lukas were in bed. So this photo is actually from Monday:

 The "first" candle is actually the second, because the original first candle had burned down completely and had to be replaced. I don't think we've ever before lit the Advent wreath consistently enough for that to happen!

Day sixteen, December 16th

Jörn got to open this one and was happy to pose with YET another day of chocolate:

And the rest will have to wait for now...maybe, maybe, I'll finish writing about Advent before Christmas!