Our Story

In 2017, we were just a normal family. We were happily married with a four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. We also happened to be expecting twins - one of our marriage’s biggest surprises.

When Lauren was 38-weeks pregnant with twins, she took Jennings to the pediatrician. He had been sick off and on for several months, never anything too serious, but with the twins coming, she wanted to figure it out. After her insistence, our pediatrician did some routine bloodwork. That’s when everything changed. I got her call and could barely make out through the sobs “they think Jennings has leukemia.”

We went straight to Novant Hemby Children’s Hospital, home of the local St. Jude Affiliate Clinic and met with an oncologist for the first time. The next day his diagnosis was confirmed as AML and we embarked on a journey that has shaped our lives in the most powerful ways over the past almost 10 years now.

The twins were born in the middle of his first round of chemo and are our little markers of time on this journey. His big sister Caroline was four at the time. We went from anticipating the twins and worrying about how to do life having four kids four and under to living, often times, one hour at a time, mostly separated – me in the hospital with Jennings – over 120 nights in those first six months, and Lauren taking care of the twins and Caroline.  

AML is the rarer form of pediatric leukemia - much harder to treat with poorer prognosis statistics to prove it. Jennings was classified as high-risk and that set us on a path for a bone marrow transplant at St. Jude. We moved our new family of 6 out to Memphis in the winter of 2018. His big sister Caroline was his donor for a successful transplant and he began the long road to recovery.

We moved back home and had a beautiful season of life. There was a solid year and a half where we traveled, lived life to the full, and hunkered down as a family during COVID, actually relishing the time together that it gave us.

Then, in the fall of 2020, seemingly out of nowhere, five-year-old Jennings relapsed. It was the lowest point of our lives. With AML, we had already used the biggest, most powerful weapon against his disease. And it still came back. We faced the same long, arduous journey that we had walked before. But we had a great team locally, and at St. Jude, treating us as if we were their only patient family. We spent a month treating his disease locally before moving our family back out to Memphis where he would eventually receive a second bone marrow transplant in March of 2021. By the grace of God, we got his leukemia in remission, the transplant was successful, and we began another long road to recovery. We are thrilled to report that, in April of 2026, we went back to Memphis for his 5-year post-transplant check-up. Lord willing that was the last time he will see the Bone Marrow Transplant team as he is officially considered “cured!”

We started this website initially as a CaringBridge page to keep everyone updated and ask for prayer. After his first transplant, a good friend used that page to create a story book of the journey. Shortly after he relapsed, we transitioned from CaringBridge to this site. I made a promise to myself that I would keep it up to date until he was officially considered cured.

Now that we achieved that milestone, we are continuing to share our lives as a family of six here on this page. God has done an amazing work in each of us…He has created beauty from the ashes. Our hope is to continue to share, both to keep ourselves reminded of where we’ve been and accountable to continuing to find the joy in the realness of life.