making pretend bird nests out of grass and selling them from a table in front of our house

I was delighted by them I don't know why nobody else was

I blame a lack of product-market fit https://twitter.com/nwilliams030/status/1259527341124063232

I also blame the fact that we lived on a very low-traffic street

probably contributed to the failure of my other products, including but not limited to:

doll furniture made out of twigs

Terrible Lemonade

toys I was going to discard

my own artwork (I was 5)

the summer my same-age cousin lived with us was characterized by me having an idea and committing to it Really Hard and her just kind of sighing and going along with it

the moneymaking schemes were particularly frustrating, I could tell that the adults thought it was cute but I was incredibly serious

I was trying to fund, the Journey

...damn I haven't thought about the Journey in years

the plan was hatched before either of us could read (4)

we had a map of the United States with pictures of things that ig were related to each state

one had a duck so our first stop was going to be Duckland (iirc this was one of the Dakotas???)

I went to each adult and tried to get them to explain the concept of north, south, etc because I knew this mattered somehow

nobody had an explanation that made sense

so I decided we could wing it

so we stuffed our little rolling suitcases with doll clothes

added some underwear when our parents pointed out that that was important

had our little children's board-book with The Map

as we were heading out my mom and uncle pointed out that it was Incredibly Dangerous and maybe Illegal? for children to cross the street with luggage

this was a dilemma we hadn't expected

and after walking around the block for an hour, brainstorming, I realized we would also need some other things to get to Duckland

like money

a neighbor lady drove up alongside us at one point and said she'd heard we needed money for a hotel

she gave us 50 cents

as she drove away I felt a sinking sense of dismay

I didn't know much about money but I knew a hotel would cost more than a gumball

I recall watching her car shrink into the distance

turning to my cousin and saying

"...wait. we could have asked her for a ride."

anyways that first attempt sparked a summer of half-baked business ideas that somehow never came to fruition despite my excellent taste and customer service

we kept making grand plans for the Journey, eventually realizing that it would be best to plan it out further, when we were sixteen and could drive

until one day when we were 11

and my cousin turned to me in the middle of my excited babbling and said

"I'm tired of talking about the Journey. it isn't going to happen and it's kind of babyish since we planned it when we were four."

my heart broke and we never really talked about it again.

it's hard to overstate the extent to which this plan occupied my mind for ~7 years

and then poof

it went away :(