hi happy independence day america! well, yesterday anyway. as i am currently writing this, on july 5, there are still fireworks and firecrackers being set off – which i wouldn’t mind, except for the fact that it’s 10pm and they’re super loud and i’m hoping to go to sleep soon. i feel like a crabby old woman lol anyway! i had such an incredible time at home for 4 days. it was the best! i got to spend so much time in the sun with friends and family and i really needed that little vacay. we made a little trip to marquette for the day and went hiking with kylo. i’ll have another blog post with those photos later this week or weekend, but we literally took like 700 photos.. sooo.. that’s a lot to dig through. i say this way too often but – i’m obsessed with sparklers! – seriously. i think they should be used all year long and not mainly on the fourth of july. below are a few photos we took as we were waiting for the fireworks yesterday night. as usual, i felt so rushed! i feel like we just didn’t have enough time to get as many photos in as i would have liked. we were trying to beat the sunset and we ended up being late to the fireworks, but it was fun regardless. we had these colored sparklers, which were cool and all, but they were really smokey. i’m not sure if i liked them as much as the classic sparklers. my friend kirsi’s jumpsuit is from asos (must be sold out because i couldn’t find it on their site anymore) and mine is from tillys and is currently on sale – if you were wondering. xo do you know how many tries it took us to get this? i was SO close to being a disney channel star!

hello saturday night dominic and i went to a lantern festival – light the sky. it’s where you pay for a lantern that you get to decorate and then a few hundred people all let their lanterns float into the sky at the same time. if there is a good amount of people, it can be pretty amazing. we ended up getting there like way too early, haha. it said doors opened at 6, so we got there at 6 because they said there would be food trucks and live music, etc. there were zero food trucks – only the concession stand and the live music didn’t even start until around 7. so that was kind of a bummer. but it wasn’t that big of  deal because it was something to do on a saturday night. so we decorated our lanterns and hung out for a few hours. they had really pretty lights hung up that we took a few photos in front of. and all in all it was a fun night! unfortunately we were a little underprepared (photo wise). we didn’t have a tripod, so taking photos of the lanterns in the dark was pretty hard. we obviously had to have a super low shutter speed to capture the light, but with a low shutter speed, you literally cannot move your hand the slightest, or it’ll blur the lights. dominic and i aren’t pros or anything, we’re still learning so if you have tips, let us know! regardless, we had a lot of fun. it was more about the experience for me, than the photos. i really wanted to live in the moment when all of the lanterns were being released. i highly recommend doing something like this if you ever get the chance! however i was SO bummed because 1. people kept letting their lanterns go way before we were supposed to. there were at least 30-45 lanterns that were released into the sky before we were all told to release them at once. i mean, it’s not really that big of a deal, but it really ruins the whole effect if 30 lanterns are being released over the course of 10 minutes, instead of hundreds of lanterns being release all at once, you know? so that was super frustrating. ALSO,  the guy said that our lanterns had about a 5 minute burn time so we had…