After a short regrouping break again we started on our journey again. We decided that we really need to find out as much information as possible so we began asking around and talking to others that had adopted. Along the way we had a friend tell us about a young women that was pregnant and wanting to give up her baby. We were so excited and hoped that this could be our child. Could this really happen this fast and this easy? We began talking with her, met her , hanging out and going to dinner. She was very shy and hesitant at first as were we. I mean how to do talk to a complete stranger about giving up their child to be raised and loved by someone else. The longer and deeper involved we got with this young lady the more complicated her situation became. To make a very long story short she had other children taken away and DHR involvement and keeping this current baby wasn't even an option for her. The more conversations we had it became clear that she wasn't planing on terminating her parental rights and wanted someone to just "raise" her child and be able to come in and out of this child's life whenever. So after  4 months of involvement with her and excitement at maybe being parents , NOTHING! I was really beginning to realize that these stories of kids just falling in someone's lap were extremely few and far between.
We decided that we needed to look at all the options out there . Did we want to go through DHR and foster to adopt? What was the difference between using an agency or a consultant? Did we want to wait and see if we could find a young lady wanting to give up her child and do this all ourselves? What we learned was doing it alone is a lot of work and very hard. We went and spoke with our local DHR system and were not impressed at all. Plus the laws in Alabama much like others are put in place to try and reunite the biological families and don't really support the foster parents. In this state the biological parents or ANY family members has 22 months to get their act together or change their mind and come get their child back. Yes people I said 22 MONTHS!!! So what this means is that after completing a 10 week parenting program and having a child placed with us their family could come and take them back anytime within the next 2 years!  Are you kidding me, after we have raised, nurtured, feed and clothed this child. After we have been there in the middle of the night comforting, fixing scraped knees, taking care of them when they were sick, changing diapers getting no sleep, etc. No, no way was I going to do this. Yes it would be extremely less expensive but I knew that I could not emotionally do this. I would have been devastated if I had to give them back, so we said no to DHR. Since we said no we now had to figure out what agency we would be using. Time for a lot of research!!