August 2025 – Steam trains, sweating and slow slip-stitch sweaters
This past month slipped by in a haze of suncream, BBQ smoke and the distant choo choo of my son yelling “MALLARD” at full volume. There were paddling pools, knitting needles and pizza. It was, frankly, a lot. But overstuffing our calendars during the summer months is what we do to prepare for the hibernation that is October through to February, right?
We skipped the chaos of a big birthday party this year and took our “newly-minted” two-year-old up to the National Railway Museum in York instead. And I can honestly say, seeing his face when he clocked the “Actual Mallard” (as he calls it) in real life was one of my all-time favourite mum moments. 100% worth the trip, and one we’ll be repeating for sure.
Later in the month, we followed it up with a trip to a local Steam & Country Show, which turned out to be a little boy’s paradise: rows of old-fashioned lorries, gleaming tractors and lumbering traction engines that looked like something straight out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He was in his element, completely grime-smudged and wide-eyed, pointing at everything with a breathless urgency. Honestly, I don’t think he’s come back down to earth since.
The heat this month has been, quiet frankly, rude. We’ve been round to friends’ houses for BBQs, children bobbing about in the paddling pool, and me perpetually trying to knit while keeping one eye on whether someone’s about to slip on a wet patio tile.
Mid-August brought blessed relief in the form of a little family trip to Norfolk. It was a chance to flee our house renovations (the kitchen is chaos, we’ve lost our home office and it’s not the best place for a toddler to roam right now). We breathed in the fresh sea air, caught a glorious steam train down at a local station (did I mention my son likes trains?) and watched cheerful holiday-makers crabbing off the Wells-next-the-Sea harbour wall.
And somehow, just like that, all the babies in our little new-mum circle are suddenly two. It’s wild. My own small boy, chattering away about fire engines and Thomas The Tank Engine and demanding “one more story!” at bedtime, feels both brand new and ancient to me. Watching all these little ones shift from babies to brash, muddy-kneed toddlers has been the gentlest (and loudest) reminder that this time is fleeting.
There are days that feel endless, of course. But right now, the pace of it and the way they grow and change and start stringing full sentences together while you’re still trying to finish your toast is enough to make me stop mid-chaos and just breathe it all in.
So quite a lot happened this month, but knitwise – what occurred?
