Fun with Finances at Pacific Gardens

Pacific Gardens is a cohousing community, but it is also a condominium, so each year we are required to present a budget at our Annual General Meeting outlining our income and expenses and all that tedious financial stuff.

Now in other stratas I've lived in, the hapless owners got the budget delivered to them before the AGM, full of incomprehensible columns of figures, and at the meeting, were given a cursory explanation of what it all meant, before voting on it.

Not so at Pacific Gardens.  We do it differently.  First, we include everyone in discussions about the budget - owners, renters, and children. Second, we explain why we spend what we do in a way that people can understand. And third, we try to make it fun!

So, on Friday afternoon, we had a Fun with Finances table out in the atrium, with pie charts, wall posters, a list of frequently asked questions, quizzes, a draw for a prize, plus tea and ginger cookies.

This all took place amidst the usual bustle of activity in the atrium - children doing cartwheels, Matt replacing burnt-out bulbs in the hallway lights, and me distributing containers of soup left over from the Thursday night potluck.

Mia made sure that everyone who passed by got asked what they would like to see in this year's budget.  Anna, four, asked if there was money for bubbles. Her older brother, Joel, wanted a peach tree in the garden. Soma hoped we could have monkey bars for the kids to play on.

The adults mostly wanted to keep their strata fees the same, but when they saw how big the slices were for our hydro and insurance payments on the big colourful pie chart on the wall, they realized that might not be possible!

I used to be a reporter, and I was always told, "follow the money" when I was trying to figure out what was happening for a story.  If people were trying to hide how money was spent, you knew something wasn't right.

And if leaders of governments and organizations were open and honest about their finances and made a real effort to explain what they were doing, you knew they could be trusted.

Finances and budgets may seem boring, but how they're handled can tell you something about what a community is like to live in - whether it's run democratically, or just for a few, whether everyone's concerns are heard and respected, or ignored.

That's why we try to make finances fun at Pacific Gardens, because we want everybody who lives here to feel included.

Kathryn

A little sparkle...

So, It was that time for PG to get a little festive.

I lead the children's activities. We glittered up pine cones and made small snowflakes for the children's tree. Then Gloria made about a hundred cookies and the kids decorated them. They stayed out with the veggies, popcorn, tea and hot chocolate for the showings of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and The Grinch. And then the kids took the left overs door to door to hand them out to our neighbours.



This is the adult tree with paper snowflakes.



And this is the kids' tree:



 In true PG style the baking, hot chocolate, decorating, cleaning etc. was all a team effort.

That being said, after all of that chaos, I am feeling a bit burnt out. Maybe it would be nice to split up the decorating and the crafts and make two special and fun days instead of fitting it all into one.

But kicking back and watching a funny movie was just the thing I needed. Thank you!

-Myriam

Pacific Gardens is Kidville!

Children at Pacific Gardens are especially blessed.

It's not just because we have a great outdoors play area where they can run, jump, dig, climb trees, play on the teeter-totter, ride their bicycles and tricycles and wagons and swing on the swings.

It's because they never have to go on a play-date. It's total kidville - they just tumble out the door, and there's always someone ready to do magic tricks, or learn break-dancing, play table-tennis, have a tea-party, or pretend to be a Ninja Turtle (who would have thought they're still in style?).

I always know when school's out, because there's a crowd of weans (as the Scots would say) roaring through the atrium playing games or running in and out of each other's homes as they plot their next adventures.

Now some people my age would really object to that, but I don't.  To me, it's the sound of happiness, the sound of children playing as they should play, free to explore, to come up with their own ideas for games, and to have the extended physical activity they require to grow up strong and healthy.

When I see the way the children here are free to roam, safe in a community where we all look out for each other, it reminds me of my childhood more than a half-century ago, when I would leave the house at nine in the morning and come back for supper - and nobody worried.

The children at Pacific Gardens are experiencing the best of both worlds - the freedom of unstructured play, within the protection of a cohousing neighbourhood where they know they are welcomed and loved.

Kathryn

Kids, Cats and Birds

I am grateful that my cohousing community allows pets as I am and have always been a cat lover. My beautiful black cat is shy with strangers, especially ones bearing vacuum cleaners, but he is very warm and social with me and likes nothing more than sitting on my lap when I relax, and sitting on my keyboard when I try to type.

I placed another cat, this one molded out of plaster at my front door to greet visitors. The plaster cat used to have a plaster mouse partner to keep it company until a boy in our community who shall remain nameless, accidentally, in the throes of play, knocked the mouse off of a ledge causing it to fall and break. I was very impressed when the same young man showed up at my door to apologise and take full responsibility for his actions.

What a great teacher this brave, principled young man was, quickly reminding me that we live closely together, we are likely to bump into one another or into one another's things, sometime causing harm and breakage, but that times like these can be opportunities to deepen friendships, grow, and build trust. His act of courage and doing the right thing instead of the easy thing allowed me to remember that one of the reasons we choose to live in communities is that we can learn and be inspired by small actions of others.

This incident happened at least a year ago and I had all but forgotten about it until the other day when I found a small bag at my door with a card that read:

Dear Sharon,

I'm sorry for breaking your mouse such a long time ago but here is a replacement. It's a bird that I painted.

It is delightful when your children perform acts like this, it is even more delightful when your neighbour's children do. Luckily, my cat likes birds even more than mice!

Sharon

The bird that landed on Sharon's doorstep

It Takes A Community to Make a Sandbox!

Here are some pictures from our sand delivery - lots of male bonding over a wheelbarrow, with sweat and a heavy sand load for our sandbox. All of them ready to help in the hot midday sun! 

Men in action  are great. The guys get the job done and  they are so wonderful how they go about it all. I was totally impressed with their expertise dumping and loading the wheelbarrow so the kids could have a clean sandbox to play in.

Mia

A new day

The entry entitled Six on Annie's Sensible Living blog brought up regrets for me. When I see how Annie, Krista of the This Inspired Life blog, and some other parents of young children employ the principles of nonviolent communication, my heart aches.

When my kids were young, I did the best I could with the information, resources and personal capacity I had at the time. But, if I had known then what I know now, I would have done many things differently. Yet I don't have a rewind button that allows me to go back and start again. So my whole past -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- remains my past.

What I am focusing on now is cultivating compassion for myself. I believe that, if I am kind to myself, it will increase my capacity for kindness towards others. I have a tendency to beat up on myself. I am inclined to judge my past actions on the basis of facts and support systems that are available to me now but to which I did not have access then. When I notice myself doing that, I make a conscious effort to return to the present moment, because that's all I have to work with.

With that said, I look forward to interacting with children at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. The prospect of living in an intergenerational community was one of the features that attracted me to cohousing. It will provide me with the joy of being in close proximity to little people who are full of life and energy. I experienced that exhilaration when I spent a few days at Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.

Not only will it be fun for me, but it also will provide a supportive environment for the parents of those young children. I will be one of the people who will form a surrogate extended family for them. The younger families in our community will have relationships with middle aged and older people who, although they are imperfect, nevertheless aspire to nonviolent communication.

Moving into cohousing will give me an opportunity to interact with children in new ways. I may not have a rewind button, but I do have the capacity to change, to chew through the cocoon that protected and yet imprisoned me when I was a caterpillar and emerge as a butterfly with greater range and freedom.

Happy sixth birthday to Lily, and happy metamorphosis day to Judy.

Making peace with men

It was serendipitous that my visit to the Royal British Columbia Museum took place at a time when I was re-reading a marvelous book, Iron John by Robert Bly.

Although the museum collection caused me to recall the suffering to which "progress" and "development" have subjected hunter-gatherers, our modern way of life has created challenges for contemporary men too.

As Bly states, the relationship that has been most severely damaged by the Industrial Revolution is the one between father and son. During our hunting-gathering days and even during our agricultural days, fathers and sons used to work alongside each other. Think of the farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters who passed on their skills to their sons.

In an agricultural society, fathers work close to home. They return to their houses for lunch. Their wives and children understand what they do for a living and interact with them a lot.

But that changed for us when men went off to work in distant factories and mines, and later in offices. Their work became specialized, their family members no longer understood what they did for a living, and their wives and children saw much less of them.

Some men, who were forced to work punishing hours, were exhausted, and behaved like jerks.

Women resented being less powerful, but let off steam by disparaging men. One of the rhymes that I remember my mother reciting was:

Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice.
Boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails.

Once we were both middle aged, I told one of my brothers that I felt uncomfortable about having been elevated at his expense. I asked him how he had felt when he had heard those words. He said, "Like a piece of shit." I felt so sad when he shared that with me.

We see variations on this theme all over the place. For example, television ads invariably portray the dad as the resident idiot who doesn't have the first clue about cold medicine. Then the mom rolls her eyes before revealing the magic elixir that will fix everything.

I am sorry to report that there was a time when I was that smug mom. But I like to think that I have outgrown that attitude.

I know, from first hand experience, that some men behave badly. Yet, with that having been said, I am finding it deeply rewarding to be gaining a new recognition of the gifts that men have to offer the world.

The society that I want to nurture is one that is supportive towards men, women, children and, indeed, our planet. My membership of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community is central to that commitment.