Jennifer, the girls and I were lucky enough to be invited to the annual Barnes Family Memorial Day Party. What a great time we had. There was an appetizer contest, enough food to feed a small army (amazing ribs!), a jazz band, dancing to go along with the band, and bingo. Plus, some of the nicest people ever. I made a number of photographs, just head over to Events on my Smugmug page.
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Not much to say, except that Mia and I went to the DSAGSL family picnic this past Saturday. The weather was great, although a little windy, and it looked like everyone had a wonderful time. As always, there was dancing, carnival games, a blow-up bounce house that had an attached slide (way cool), a jump rope team, great hotdogs (provided by the Florissant KofC), popcorn, snow cones, Rams Cheerleaders, a face painting clown, and most importantly some of the greatest people in and around St. Louis.
To see a few more photos go to the DSAGSL SmugMug site.
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Brunch at L’ÉcoleCulinaire!
Olivia’s brownie troop was fortunate enough to be able to celebrate Mother’s Day with a special brunch prepared by Chef Jason Sparks at L’EcoleCulinaire. The brownies served the food that Chef prepared. Assisting that day was a true assistant and soon to be graduate of the school, Mike, along with a very helpful newbie, John, and of course a guy who spent most of his time behind a camera, me. However, I did make the whipped cream by hand.
The brunch started with a fresh fruit and yogurt parfait that was prepared almost exclusively by John. That was followed by an amazing quiche that was made completely from scratch, (Tip: For a great crust, use ice cold water.) along with a fantastic balsamic salad. To end the feast was some type of chocolate waffle topped with my whipped cream and fresh strawberry sauce.
The girls were eager to serve their mothers and I believe the moms had a wonderful time.
To see the rest of the photos from the day, visit my Flickr page and look at the Brunch at L’Ecole Culinaire Set.
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No, I do not think of myself as a chef, but for Mother’s Day we were celebrating with my wife, Jennifer, and her mother. As is typical I was outside grilling and decided to put on the chef’s coat that Jason Sparks so kindly gave to me. He is a chef instructor at L’Ecole Culinaire and it is one of his old coats. I wore the coat just to be a little silly, but also because it is nice to not worry about getting something on your clothes when cooking. So I just may wear it more often.
For the story on why Jason (a.k.a. Chef) gave me the coat, give me some time to post about Olivia’s girl scout troop’s Mother’s Day Brunch at L’Ecole Culinaire.
I apologize for the quality of the photo, but it is the best I could do with my Blackberry. It is good enough for you to see that we were having pork tenderloin, corn on the cob and asparagus. It all turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. Not up to the standards of the chef’s coat I was wearing, but good enough for the Pomrankas.
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It has been a couple of weeks since the accident where Mia slammed her finger in a door and she is healing nicely. So I figured it was about time to add a post about the incident. I don’t think I will go through all the gory details, just enough to give you the big picture.
It all happened the night before we were leaving for a vacation to a water park. Mia was in the house running to keep up with her big sister who just went out the back door. Some how Mia caught her finger in the door. Ouch!
After cleaning it off, we made the pretty obvious decision that a doctor needed to see it. Mia and I hop in the avalanche and head off to MO Baptist Pediatric ER. While Mia was screaming in pain, once in the car she started to calm down. She did say she wanted her Ga, a.k.a. grandmother and when I called and gave Mia the phone, that just made her cry more.
At the hospital Mia was amazing! She was very calm and let the doctors do their thing. It did take quite a while to get everything ready (x-rays, local anesthesia, a couple of opinions, etc.) but Mia was a trooper through the whole four hours. 
The end result was a broken finger tip and the finger nail had come out of the nail bed. However, the repair work went well and after a couple months of a cool, black finger, Mia should be back to normal.
Of course the doctors told us to keep the finger dry. However, that did not keep us from going on and enjoying our trip to Great Wolf Lodge. Vinyl gloves and some elastic wrap worked wonders!
When we returned for follow up visits, Mia was again pretty good. The first visit she was a little nervous about the nurse taking off her bandage, but not as bad as Jennifer. But Mia learned to keep her finger safe and kept up her active lifestyle.
We had our second follow up visit and all is going well. You can see the very tip of her middle finger is broken in the image of the x-ray (Now a days they show you a print of the x-ray, and you get to take them home. 
If you click on the image, you can see the very tip of the finger is broken.
Now Mia is doing great. She only has a small bandage on her finger keeping the finger nail clean and a little protected. When the doctor took the splint off, at first Mia refused to bend her finger. So we had an OT come down and talk to Mia about the importance of bending her finger and gave me some OT games to play with Mia. Of course by that evening Mia was bending her finger just fine and even wanted to show the doctor how well she was doing.
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