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Originally Posted By Deana

We were matched with kids in CAl. last summer and were thrilled. The state does not pay for travel. They will reimburse some of the expense when you finalize the adoption. We were working with Los Angeles county. They will do the finalization there at no expense to you. The thing that happened with us was that we went for our visits and it turned out the worker thought a 4 and 5 year old can't understand adoption so he had told them nothing about us and on the second visit the foster mom decided to sabotage the placement(she wants to keep them in long term foster care) and since they hadn't been prepared to move to us she was successful in upsetting them so the worker said that if they don't want to go we can't make them so we were not allowed to adopt them. Our agency tried to get some of our travel expenses reimbursed but California said that since we didn't adopt the kids they won't reimburse. We would still take these kids to this day if we had been allowed to. So our experience with them turned out really bad and we almost quit looking.
We got our girls on Aug. 25th and Alabama brings the kids to you for visits and for placement. We only had one 5 day visit before they were placed. You have no travel expenses but their subsidy is low, currently $254 a month. I would recommend them as far as low expenses and such but was disappointed that I had no contact with their foster parents and most files were provided up front but they didn't give us their counseling notes until after we signed the placement papers and there was some new info in there.