Those of you who don’t know us from the GA community, we are Jay and Amber Whipple. We’ve been married 16 years and have 8 amazing kids, ages ranging from 24 to 11 years old.

Almost two decades ago, Jay and I decided with his 3 kids and my 3 kids we were going to blend our families into one big family. After a few years, we decided to have two more. Our first child, being a son, was born with Potocki-Lupski syndrome who is non verbal and beautiful little girl.

In 2014, my husband's older two kids had to get out of the situation they were in, and by 2015 we had 7 kids full-time. As you could imagine, it’s been a lot of work, sweat, and tears into our family but also a lot of love, laughter, and life lessons.

We have been through some hard times in our 16 years of marriage. We have had a lot of ups and downs, but now we face uncertainty in our journey as Jay has been diagnosed at the age of 41 with Cirrhosis of the liver stage 4. He’s never been a big drinker and barely and rarely even drank in the past 5 years, but genetically he has alpha-1 phenotype MZ, which means he’s also a carrier of liver disease. We have started the journey with U of M and are undergoing all the steps to put him on a transplant list. We know that means he’s going to get way sicker before he can go up the transplant list in order to receive a liver.

Unfortunately, other complications have made it nearly impossible for Jay to work without being too sick or in pain. So we are asking for help and any donations possible to help us with Christmas for our littles and bills. We’ve also been traveling to Ann Arbor monthly and sometimes twice a month. Things are hard enough and any love and kindness you can show us would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for reading our story and God bless ♥️