Third Strand Baby Walton

Third Strand’s mission is provide safe donor breast milk to healthy nursing babies who have lost a mother; to babies whose mothers are unable to breastfeed, due to a serious and life-threatening illness; and, to adopted newborns.

It’s not often that I still get to personally deliver coolers of milk to the families we serve, but it is still one of my favorite things to do. Getting to meet our new Third Strand families always roots me in the “why” behind all of the work.

Please welcome our newest baby, Walton! Here is this family’s story:

“We have a history of adoption in our families and knew that we would adopt together one day. We started our family in 2012 but sadly lost our twins, Christmas of 2012, to miscarriage cause by medical practice. It was a few years before we wanted to try again, but in September 2015 we were excited to give birth to a sweet baby girl. Fast forward to the end of 2021 and we started heavily researching options for adoption, as we knew adoption was heavy on our hearts and something the Lord was calling us to do. At the end of May 2022, we signed with a consultant agency and officially started the adoption process. In early December of that same year, we discovered that our consultant agency was not a good fit, so we made the huge decision to switch to a local to us adoption agency.

We remember telling a friend in January that we “really wished the process would move more quickly” (it had slowed down because of the holidays) because something about the week or so surrounding Mother’s Day seemed “big” for us. We weren’t sure if it would be big because of a baby, but just something major would be happening for our family around that time. Fast forward to mid April 2023 and we went active with our agency, where we could start seeing potential birth mom stories.

That was on a Wednesday evening, and by the following Monday evening we had matched with a birth mom only an hour away from us! She gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy just a few weeks later at the end of May. We were given the incredible joy of being in the hospital when he was born so that he was in our room within just minutes of birth.

A few days later we went home with our precious Walton, overwhelmed with gratitude for the absolute gift his birth mother had given to us. We had many local friends donate breastmilk from the very beginning, but quickly worked through that by the time Walton was about a month old. That’s when a friend introduced us to Third Strand. We are thrilled to be approved by Third Strand so that Walton can have the best dietary start possible.”

Thanks to our amazing Donor Moms, this family doesn’t have to worry about what Baby Walton will be eating!