TGIF

Happy Friday! It's going to be summer-like here this weekend so I am looking forward to the weekend ahead!

The book I'm reading is Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It's 600+ pages so it will take me while to get through it but I am enjoying it. He's a very quiet, thoughtful writer so it's a slower paced novel. The protagonist in the novel is writing about his grandparents settlement in the west in the late 1800s. His grandfather worked for mines so they lived in some remote places. I'm not sure if any of this is autobiographical - it kind of reads like it is, though! 

The high of my week was getting together with a friend I hadn't seen in 2 years (!!!) for a walk. She has a 7 and 10 yo so it's been hard to plan get togethers in the past with all the activities her kids are in. I reached out to her this fall to see if she wanted to get together for a walk and we made it work. It was great to catch up! We met back in 2004 at my first job out of college and she sang in our wedding in 2017. It's one of those friendships where you can go a long time without talking and you just pick up where you left off!

The low of my week was RA flares. Oof, I am in a really bad stretch. I've had 4 flares in the last week - 2 in my feet, one in my left pointer finger and then both hips are flaring right now. I've never had a flare in my hip joints before and wow it is painful. I am hobbling around like a 90yo woman and sleeping is really tough as you need to sleep on your side when pregnant. I've increased the dose of my steroids so hopefully they do the trick soon. If this keeps up, these last 8 weeks of pregnancy are going to be looooong. I went off my weekly RA injections at 28 weeks so I had a feeling things might get worse but I didn't imagine this many flares. :( 

This is what an RA flare looks like - the impacted joint is the pointer finger.

A recipe I made was Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas with Homemade GF Enchilada Sauce. I made these on Thursday, but made the enchiladas sauce and poached/shredded the chicken on Wednesday to make enchilada assembly faster. The enchilada sauce is very easy to make and requires staple pantry ingredients/spices - at least for us. Everybody liked this, including picky Pablo. Because of spanish immersion daycare, he tends to love/eat Mexican food!

I forgot to take a pic before Phil and Paul had dished up! I added olives since we love them. 

A show we are watching is nothing at the moment... We watched the Epstein documentary series and the American Murder documentary series which is about the Denver-area husband who killed his wife and 2 daughters. Both were horrifying and I wondered why we watched such grim shows?? Phil and I have very different tastes in tv, though, so we tend to watch documentaries and most of what caught our eye was sad/dark stuff. We definitely need something lighter! We also watched "The World's Toughest Race" on Prime which we both enjoyed. We had fun talking about who we would have on our teams. Our number one pick for both of us was our friend Kyria! She's the toughest, most fit person we both know. We met through blogging but now we have joint custody of her as a friend as Phil and her get along super well - they are both frugal, and love hiking/the outdoors and beer!

The best money spent was on some LS shirts from Target for Paul. We mostly rely on hand-me-down clothes but he was in need of some warmer clothes for fall/winter. Target had a bunch for $5 which you really can't beat so I bought 8 shirts!

My plans this weekend include getting together tonight with 2 former coworkers for an outdoor take-out meal. The high will be 82 so it should be a really pleasant evening to be outside! Tomorrow we are doing a post-nap play date with my friend whose kids go to the same daycare. I told Paul about the play date on Wednesday night and he keeps asking if today is the day we go to their house? I'm also planning on baking these pumpkin oatmeal cups with Paul. They have too many carbs for me to eat but I think Paul and Phil will enjoy them and they are fairly healthy. And then on Sunday after Paul's nap we are going out to Phil's HS friend's house for a bday get together for one of his friends. This is the group we got together with for Phil's bday in August. The couple that hosts us has a huge house on a lake with a huge outdoor table. So we can all safely spread out. So it's kind of a 'busyish' weekend, but the right amount of activity for me and it's all outdoors so very covid-safe!

Bonus Paul photo!

My only Paul photo from the week is the one I took on Tuesday when we went to the creek to throw rocks. It was 80 degrees that day so very summer-like! 

How was your week? Any shows you'd recommend for a documentary-loving couple?