Read Around the Rainbow | What I’m Looking Forward To

It’s Read Around the Rainbow time!!! On the last Friday of every month, we’re a bunch of authors who get together and blog on the same topic. Since it’s a new year, we figured we should focus on something positive and talk about what we’re looking forward to in 2025.

At first, I thought I’d skip this month because with the world falling apart, I’m not really seeing anything worth looking forward to. Bleak, I know, but I feel like we’re balancing on the edge of the precipice of something truly horrendous. Remember the feeling when covid rolled in? That’s how I feel right now.

But I gave it a few days, and do you know what? I look forward to the gardening season. Where I live, I have an estimated 138 frost-free days. It’s a challenge 😅 When Mum passed away, I promised myself I’d buy a greenhouse for the money I inherited when everything was done with the estate. At first, I imagined a fancy one, but we’re not sure we’re gonna live here for more than a few more years (hubby is a military man, and his contract is running out), so I bought a polytunnel.

This will be the second season I’ll grow anything in it, so yeah, I’m excited about that.

My second thing… There is no evil that does not bring something good. We had a mink, weasel, stoat, or something along those lines, get into the chicken coop a couple of months ago.

Several days in a row, I came out to find headless chickens. Not fun at all. Quite traumatic, I have to admit. Both for the chicks and me. I have now moved my chickens to the first chicken coop we built when we moved here. It’s smaller, but they’ve been fine ever since, so we must’ve done a better job building it.

Anyway, my flock is smaller than I want it to be, which means baby chicks!!! I think I’m gonna buy myself some eggs from fun breeds and put in the incubator. Soon. I might hold on for a few more weeks since January and February are the coldest months in Sweden, and baby chicks don’t do well when it’s too cold and they don’t have a mama to look after them.

Then I have a parental failure I feel I have to fix. My youngest is quite fascinated with sharks. We watch Jaws, The Meg, and films like that quite often. She asked me one day if I’d ever seen a living shark. I chuckled a little and told her ‘Yes, and so have you.’ Then I realised, she hasn’t. When we lived on the West Coast, we took the kids to Gothenburg quite often, and there is an aquarium with some sharks. And while I’m against animals in cages, we went there a few times. We moved here when I was pregnant with her.

Then we went to Copenhagen to their aquarium, but she was just a small toddler, so we left her with my MIL over the day and took the three oldest. Then covid hit, and we went nowhere. Then my MIL passed away, and then my mother passed away only two months later, and we’ve had no one to look after the animals to go on any trips since, so… Perhaps not something I look forward to as much as a goal I have. To get my daughter to a shark.

That’s about what I have now. There are always books I want to read, stories I want to write, series to watch, things to do with the kids, and so on, but the garden and the chickens are the ones I look forward to.