Summer Road Trip: how life got in the way of best-laid plans

Ivie Anderson with her brother Elijah.

Each year Charles Anderson endeavours to take his daughter on a trip somewhere and write about it. This year, life got in the way of that trip. Cue existential crisis.

I was somewhere in the middle of our hallway when the overwhelming desire to break down in a fit of uncontrollable sobbing came over me.

The photos were off the walls, the kitchen was packed up. Toys were in boxes, clothes stuffed away. After three years in our first home, we were moving out.

Earlier in the evening I had sat down with my daughter, now on the brink of 4 years old, and watched old videos on my phone. Even in the space of a year, time seemed to have sped up.

There was Ivie, 3 years old, helping bottle my first batch of terrible homebrew beer.

"All done," she says, wearing her furry one-piece pyjama suit. "Give it to Daddy."

Then she scuttles across the floor with a bottle of beer in hand to give to me.

There was Ivie, in the bath, hair much shorter, much less the crazy mullet that she sports now, telling me that I was wrong. There was me, telling her that it would soon be time to get out of the bath because I was the "boss".

"I am the boss and you are the baby."

She interjects: "No! I am the boss. I am the boss."

Then she tries to drink the bathwater.

Cooking marshmallows over the brazier, that one time we used it. Digging up sand in the pit I built in my first limp attempt at outdoor DIY. Her eating spaghetti for the first time and saying the word: "Deyisiusshhh," Iike it wasn't a thing. Having her first sleepover with a friend.

But these were her final days here. Her mum was overseas, her brother staying with his dad. We were alone for this last weekend.

Now she was in the lounge, watching cartoons on one of her last nights in this place. She had grown up so much here. Our family had grown up so much too. But I knew that when we moved, Ivie would very likely never remember it. It would be just a blip in her life - that time we lived in the little grey house. And then I had that moment of near-breakdown.

Packing up the house perhaps had taken its toll. I was drinking too much coffee, making too much a habit of a few drinks after dinner when the kids had gone to bed. By all accounts I was managing but I was not thriving.

Usually each year, I make an effort to take Ivie on a trip away to a place that neither of us have been to. My hope is that when she turns 18, I can give her a collection of writings marking a year of life for us both. An adventure together seemed like the best way to do this. But this year, right now, it seemed like too much. There was still things to pack away, crap to throw away. This year, our adventure would be in this home. It would be blissful normality. We would eat a pasta dinner, a picnic in the lounge. We would put nappies on teddy bear babies and she would have that final bath, in which she pooped before I had to haul her out.

Then the final countdown to that last day.

We have long painted over the markings we made on the door frame recording our children's developing heights. We have taken down the paintings that Ivie's brother did of her.

She decided to use all her Paw Patrol stickers to decorate the house - the walls, the windows, the moving boxes. Despite my protests, knowing I'd have to peel them all off were met with: "But I want to make our house beautiful!"

We did. Over three years here we made it beautiful. We had wonderful parties, nights of games around the table, building huts in the lounge on rainy days, painting our letterbox the colours of our house to give to their mother for Christmas.

Ivie pulled me close to her as she laid in her bed. Her tiny arms clung unusually tight around my neck in a terribly awkward position but I embraced it. I don't think she fully comprehended that she soon would have her last night in her lemon-yellow room with the flower curtains. Judging by that hug, maybe she did.

She protested the concept of sleep, we read two books, had a drink of water and milk, before she turned over and pulled her neon-pink unicorn and bunny rabbit towards her. And, before long, she was snoring.

Then I went around peeling those Paw Patrol stickers off myriad surfaces and I couldn't help thinking that we were slowly erasing ourselves from this place.

Part of us will always be here. That letterbox, for one, will stay. But the other reason I didn't want to write about a road trip with my daughter this year was that so I could write this piece. That one day she could read about this place, what it meant to us, what we did here, how it helped her grow into the powerful little creature she now is and how we made it our own.

I took a final photo of Ivie and her brother on the day we moved. She is posing, like she is prone to do, grinning in pink gumboots, her brother holding her tight. All those memories flashed for me like a magic eye painting.

"Goodbye house grey house," she said. "Goodbye."

And then we drove off, down the road, towards new memories.