So even though it was 99 today, it was wonderful in the shade and light breeze in the grass under the pecan trees. We had some sammiches and Arnie Palmers and made up our minds.

The Meat Shop Smoked Ham Sammich

Get In Mah Belly!

Nat’s Turn To Eat

Those Girls Over There Look Like They’re Having Fun…

What Do You Think Natasha?

It’s On!

Whole Gallery Here

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So, this past Tuesday was Natasha’s (Cita, Nat, Munch, Chunkers, Fuzzworth) 9 month birthday. It is very hard to believe that she is as old as she was in my stomach (not technically, but close enough). I have to say that so far being a mom has been one of the most wonderful but humbling experiences. I can say with all of my heart and soul I love being her mom although she said “Dada” first. I am not upset about that  in the least but Ron begs to differ. I know, all in good time, I will hear that one little word from my sweet and chunky little baby’s mouth, “Momma”.

Yesterday, August 5th, was Nat’s 9 month check-up. It is interesting to hear from our pediatrician how she thinks Nat is progressing. We think that she is the smartest, most beautiful baby in the world. Natasha wore her adorable little white sleeveless dress with silver threaded flowers at the bottom. I tried to put on her cute little white espadrilles that GeeGee got her, but she had them off in 2.2 seconds. I’m sure one day she will come to realize how important shoes really are to a girl. Natasha looked beautiful in it plus it is easy to take on and off at the doctor. I think what both Ron and I look most forward to is the height, weight and head circumference measurements. Thus far she had been 90th percentile for weight, 75th percentile for height and well 80th percentile for head circumference. I said she is very smart! Her latest stats are 28 inches tall (70th percentile), almost 21 pounds (75th percentile) and last but not least, 90th percentile for head circumference (thank you again Dada). Dr. Campbell says Natasha is doing great. She is strong and has advanced motor skills. She has been standing on her own lately which means she will be an early walker; poor Boo Boo. There was some crying involved but mostly because it was nap and food time. She had 2 vaccines. We only allow 2 each time she goes to the doctor, otherwise it is just too much for her little body to handle. That is our opinion on the subject anyway. The nurse stuck one in each polkie. Nat’s mouth opened but no sound came out. Ah, yes the silent cry. The nurse put 2 cute little flower bandaids on her and she was fine. She really is quite a trooper when it comes to that stuff.

Milestones as of late: Nat now waves goodbye, she is standing on her own, crawling is coming really well, she is all over everything and rolls over in her crib like a thousand times, walks around her crib, walks along the whole back of the couch and she is one of the most fabulous dancers ever. She really gets into it, shaking that booty. She is talking up a storm, in another language, but talking nonetheless. One of things I have learned, and my lovely friend Christi said, is that babies are working on their own things at their own times. Granted, Christie’s little sweet pea Zea is probably breaking the world record for scaling the Sears Tower, at under 9 months. The girl is seriously impressive!

Food  - she loves it! I make 99% of everything she eats. The other 1% is still very healthy. Nat will eat a baba first thing in the morning and then usually one before she goes to bed. But it seems like she doesn’t really care about that one and the rest is all solid foods. Foods she has eaten are pork, chicken, lentils, white beans, brown rice, brown rice pastas, sweet potatoes, yams, red yams, squash of every variety including the summer ones, carrots, broccoli, beets, tomatoes, regular potatoes, yogurt, cottage cheese, avocado, bananas, kiwi, plouts, egg yolk (egg white is not allowed until after a year), asparagus, plums, peaches, papaya, mango and nectarine. I label all of her food and I have started a notebook full of labels and recipes. In my spare time I am going to write a cookbook. The subtitle will be: “loving mother, almost sleepless chef.”  It has been so fun to put together different combinations and see what she likes and doesn’t. Believe me, Natasha is not shy about letting you that she doesn’t like what has just gone in her mouth. She will keep her mouth open and make a gagging noise and look at me like, “mom, really how could you feed me this horrible crap.” Her favorite is lentil, roasted tomato, olive oil, basil and parmesan cheese. Second favorite is sweet potato with white bean puree, tarragon or thyme with olive oil. Yogurt smoothies are a breakfast time fave as well.

I think that is all I have for now. We will keep you updated, with pictures of course. We are very excited because one of our best and sweetest friends, Sarah, is going to take some family photos of us. Sarah is an absolutely amazing photographer. She seems to capture something every time that makes me get teary-eyed (as I’m doing now, just talking about it).

We love you all and thanks for reading my somewhat long winded post. xoxox

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Guess what, I have a toof.

Can you see it?

How about now??

Pretty cool, huh?

Some More Recent Pics

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• 1 lb fresh pasta (ours wasn’t homemade, but the store-bought fresh stuff)
• 1 lb medium white shrimp, uncooked tail-on
• ½ cup olive oil
• couple fresh lemons, for juice and zest
• fresh garlic, slivered
• fresh basil, chiffonade  (it’s easy to grow!)
• pecorino romano cheese, grated
• kosher salt
• fresh ground fine  black pepper

You just cook the shrimp very quickly in hot olive oil with garlic slivers, salt&pepper and set aside. Then whisk together the olive oil, juice from 2 generous lemons, zest from 1-2 lemons, the basil shreds, a generous amount of romano cheese and more fresh black pepper. Pour a little of the mixture into your serving dish to coat the bottom, throw in the pasta and the shrimp and then pour more of the mixture on top. This allows you to toss gently and coat everything without chewing up the soft pasta. You may not need all the sauce mixture depending on how much juice you get. Also, fresh pasta probably only calls for about 3-4 minutes of boil time. Do even less.

That’s about it! Enjoy a fresh summer pasta :)

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Anyway, here is the chunkers in her native environment as well as out and about. She misses all of you!!! Sometimes Budders gets to tag along on excursions and he is always highly entertaining.

A couple videos below the pics now too :)

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12►

Did it happen to me? …
You may suddenly notice images not displaying on your blog(‘s) front end, or other strange behaviors. Then when you login to admin, the display is totally hosed. Basically, all the content shows up, but the layout/styles are stripped. Yup, you got it.

What happened?
A sloppy little jerk has figured out how to embed some Base64 encoded instructions into the top of every writable (php) page of your WP site. You won’t see it when you view source in your browser, but it is in your files on the server. What you will see in the source of your browser is reference to a Javascript that lives on a remote server that will be unfamiliar to you. This script sets a cookie on your visitors. And who knows what else happens. Also, it’s rumored that people who find your site via google will be redirected to some other fake site. Why? Maybe it’s a revenue scheme via Google adwords, or maybe it’s to spread malware on Windows machines. Not sure yet. Unfortunately (or fortunately!), because this jerk is sloppy, his work breaks the presentation layer of WP sites, so it’s easy to tell when you’re hit.

Now what?
Don’t call me! But if you’re relatively comfortable in source code and your webserver’s file system, here’s what worked for me. (Please note, this does NOT stop the exploit, it just cleans things up for now. Hopefully, if 2.9.2 is indeed vulnerable, WP will issue an update that will squash this.)

1. Revert to a backup from your webhost from over a month ago, if you have one. I would lose too much stuff if I did this, so no thanks. So if you don’t want to do this, then…

Do this instead:

You could download a fresh copy of WP and your theme and reinstall over your DB and try to get things back to normal, but I have customized my theme way too much to start over. I haven’t seen anyone detail that the DB itself is somehow infected, and I couldn’t find anything odd in there, so I’m taking a risk that the DB is still clean. So my effort was to keep all my content and customizations in place, while replacing all the infected files. So I cleaned what I had rather than starting fresh.

1. Download a fresh copy of WordPress 2.9.2 and set aside to pull some clean files from as needed. Might be a good idea to have a fresh version of your theme available too, but I didn’t need that.
2. Pull down your whole WordPress directory to your local machine. Delete the old files on your server, especially any older versions of WP.
3. Put up a hold page (a new index.html file in your root) that says you’re under maintenance.
4. Duplicate that WordPress directory locally and work on one copy so you have all the old crap in case you need it.
5. Now using your favorite text editor (BBEdit, Dreamweaver, emacs, wutev), look for a blob of Base64 encoded crap wrapped in php tags at the top of one of your PHP files. Then use Grep or Find&Replace to remove all from every page – I had it on over 1200pages! Make sure your efforts don’t result in blank lines at the top of your PHP files as some of them will hate this and make your site fail.
6. Get rid of your hold page and reupload your site and immediatley lock it down as much as you can: stronger passwords, delete all but your user if possible, empty your spam queue, turn off commenting, etc. Your admin interface may still look hosed, but it is still functional.
7. Now use your browser to look for things that still might be messed up:
   • Make sure the bogus js call is gone from your page source (with the Base64 shit gone, the js call should be gone).
   • See if your pages are rendering correctly.
   • Check out the admin section. Mine was still hosed, but using Firebug or Activity view in your browser, look for errors. I found that my load-scripts.php and load-styles.php in the admin directory were still failing when pulling in PHP from the admin/includes directory, so I uploaded fresh copies from my set-aside WP 2.9.2 download referenced in #1 above. This was likely due to some blank lines above the PHP in those includes after the Search&Replace. So you may not encounter that.

That pretty much did it for me. Hopefully 2.9.2 is safe when there are no older installs under the same user. If not, hopefully 2.9.3 is on the way :)

You need:

• 3 pounds FRESH halved plum tomatoes
• extra virgin olive oil (we like Colavita or Queen Creek Olive Press)
• a touch of honey
• handful of pancetta or bacon (optional for you weirdos who don’t eat meat – Hi Cassie!)
• 2 big yellow onions, diced
• lotsa garlic (several cloves, about 5-7 go in oven with tomatoes, 3 minced)
• small hunk of butter
• 1 big can of san marzano (italian) whole or minced tomatoes
• 4 cups fresh basil leaves (remove most of stem)
• some dried or fresh thyme
• 2 boxes of  stock (chicken or veggie)
• kosher salt, black pepper, pinch of red pepper flake

Then do this:
Toss the halved tomatoes with about 1/4 cup of olive oil, a drizzle of honey, a pinch of salt and fresh ground pepper. Then lay them out in one layer on a baking sheet. Throw in a several unpeeled garlic cloves. Put in pre-heated 400 degree oven for 45 min to an hour. Get them nice and toasty for the best roasted flavor.

In the meantime, start sauteeing some minced bacon in a large pot (we’ve been using the Father’s Cinnamon Cured from Bacon of the Month Club). Chop 2 large yellow onions, mince a few cloves of garlic. Remove bacon and EAT. Saute onions and garlic in bacon drippings. Once sweated, add the canned tomatoes, stock (chicken or veggie), hunk of butter, basil and a sprinkle of fresh thyme.

Apparently it’s very important to toss your hair around during this stage (see pics).

After tomatoes have roasted, add them to soup base and bring to a boil, then simmer for 45 minutes. Get all the juice/drippings from baking sheet.

Let cool, then run mixture through a food mill (or press through a fine strainer) into a separate bowl. This removes all the skin and seeds. Then return to original pot and heat to taste. It’s really good cold too – like a gazpacho! You can also reduce it down to make a kickass pasta sauce. Enjoy!

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Current stats:
Age: 5 months
Head: huge
Height: tall
Weight: ~17lbs

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Natasha | Unimpressed in the Grass

Natasha and Dada in Booboo’s Yard

Natasha Likes the Piggies

Acquire the following:

• thin spaghetti
• thick slab smokey bacon (we like applewood-smoked from AJs)
• cherub or small roma or cherry tomatoes
• broccoli rabe
• tomato water (use the water from canned san marzano’s)
• sweet onion
• fresh garlic
• white wine (sauv blanc or pinot grigio)
• fresh-grated romano cheese
• butter
• crushed red pepper
• kosher salt
• black pepper
• dried italian seasonings, or herbes de provence if you hate oregano (optional)

Do the following:

1. salt some water and start warming it for boiling pasta
2. chop the bacon into small chunks and cook in large sauté pan – remove bacon to a dish and leave rendered fat in pan
3. cook some fresh garlic slivers in the bacon fat and then remove to a dish for later garnish
4. pour some of the bacon fat into a smaller sauté pan and cook down the broccoli rabe, then chop the rabe and set aside
5. toss halved cherub tomatoes into the main pan and cook for a few minutes, then add a couple tbsps of butter to round out
6. sauté the onion and some more minced garlic with s&p and crushed red pepper and optional seasonings, add a generous splash of white wine once sweated and cook down
7. cook pasta to pre-al dente (we’re gonna finish it in the sauce)
8. when pasta is ready, use a pasta fork to take pasta directly into the sauté pan (no rinsing)
9. add a few pours of san marzano tomato water, add the chopped broccoli rabe and toss everything together over lowish heat until evenly combined

Serve with fresh-grated romano cheese and the garlic slivers from step 3. I add a little romano to step 9 as well, just cuz. Pig out!

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The spread was poached salmon, salad niçoise and Steve’s accidentally fried shrimp and scallop combo. And we brought our double-rummed tiramisu experiment. Even the boozers in the audience think we can back off on the rum next time. But everything was delicious and Natasha kept everyone entertained.

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The Ruby Red color is a fantastic addition to the line-up and all the thoughtful new features make an already great stroller/travel system even better. Thanks for showing everyone that Orbit really is listening!

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