Jenn {Berg} Dowd ~ My Teaching Partner

In the school of education at IU you were placed in these "clusters". They were essentially a pod of people who took almost all the same classes together for the last two years of school and you got to know these girls {I don't think we had any guys in our classes} REALLY well.

I got to know one girl better than the rest {maybe it was because we both had to take summer school and no one else did during the year of the cicadas...OH YUCK, that sound just makes me want to squirm}...my teaching partner, Jenn Berg!!!

We call each other our teaching partners because during our clusters we had to do practicums and initially you partnered up with someone and did your lessons together.

How I got so lucky to have Jenn as my partner, I will never know, but this girl was AWESOME! She was creative, HIGHLY organized and fun!!!

Oh and she can SING!!! She was in a group called Ladies First {a really prestigious acapella group at IU}. Phil and I went to watch one of their performances around Christmas and it was AMAZING...Honestly, Jenn is really, really talented.

Our second placement together was in a first grade class in Bloomington where we taught an excellent {super creative} 6 lesson series on Australia. Jenn was going to Australia for a semester abroad so it seemed appropriate. We did all sorts of things, like a music lesson and a sea life lesson. We were pretty impressed with ourselves. I even dressed up in a wetsuit like a scuba diver on the Great Barrier Reef.





One of my best memories with Jenn was the night that just the two of us decided it would be a good idea to go out by ourselves. It was snowing, but that did not detract us from our mission to have a good time. We went down to Kirkwood and had our own little bar crawl of sorts. Our only flaw in plan was that we didn't have a way home, so we rode the 'drunk bus' back to our houses, which provided even more entertainment!



As luck would have it, after college Jenn moved back to Cincinnati and we were pretty far apart, but we kept in touch and life kept moving. Five years after we graduated, I finally lived in Indy and she drove over and we had dinner together!!! It was so great to see her happily married with her first baby on the way!

That was last summer. Now she has a handsome little boy and is no longer in education {we are both burnt out on education for a while} and she is a project manager part time at a dentist office, which works out great so she can work and be with Gavin!

Emrie and I drove to Ikea in Cincinnati last week and had lunch with Jenn and Gavin. It was so great to catch up with her and meet her little man. Even though we have come a long way since our teaching partner days in college, we are able to pick right back up where we left off. As always, we had a hilarious time, only now instead of laughing about teacher stuff, we were cracking up about motherhood and how horribly difficult it is!!!

Despite our distance, I am SO thankful that I can have such a wonderful friend that I can pick up with no matter how much time or space has passed and to watch her grow into the wonderful wife and mother that she has become!

p.s. Jenn deserves friend of the year award for her selflessness too...When Emrie and I went to Ikea, we were looking for a chair for her room but they were out of the white slipcovers. So Jenn went back to Ikea, not once, but twice to get it for me and ship it to my house...I owe her big time!!!