Of What Are Your EARLIEST Childhood Memories?

[arwalden]

I recall being 3 or 4 and being ju-u-ust tall enough to peek inside my parent's console stereo cabinet. I could lift the lid and see the turntable spinning the record. (Obviously I was very easily entertained.)

-- Allen

[Richardo]

1. Riding my tricycle to my grandparents' house (3 houses down)

...Was no more than 3 1/2.

[terrya]

2. My dad taking me to the car dealers in September, when the new models...

came out.

I used to love cars. I could name the make and model of a car just by sight.

I remember when I was 6 or so, Dad would take me to all of the car dealerships to look at the new models. We could never afford a new car, but Dad knew how much I liked cars.

Weird memory...but one I still remember.

Terry

[bigwillq]

3. Playing in my step-grandfather's garden

collecting the eggs from the chickens and helping him mown the lawn with the rider mower. No, he didn't live on a farm.

[Semi_subversive]

4. I remember going to a house

when I was about two and my parents picking out a Pekingese puppy.

[bobbieinok]

5. not yet three

I was sitting on the backporch and trying to understand what I'd been told - we were moving back to Stillwater.

I remember having a hazy picture of houses up on poles above water.

And then on the trip - my brother threw a toy out the window, and my parents wouldn't go back for it.

The first memory probably imprinted itself because I was trying to figure out what 'still water' was.

The 2nd because I was furious that my parents wouldn't go back. So many years later and I can still feel a bit of that anger.

[blackcat77]

6. A circus

I remember clowns and loud noise. I was 3 at the time.

[asjr]

7. My first memory is

terrible. It was during the Great Depression and my parents and I lived with my grandparents in a big Victorian house with a wraparound porch. There was a swing on the porch (I must have been only 3 years old) which I loved. Each day an older man would come up the hill on his way home with a burlap bag over his shoulder. I never paid any attention to him except to just notice him. One day (and I do not remember which person in my family told me) someone told me to be very careful because that man would put me in his bag and take me off. I don't remember ever sitting in that swing again. Even though I don't remember who it was that told me that horrible thing, I have never forgiven them. I have never forgotten that, even to this day. I think it might have been my grandfather (whom I dearly loved) and was just teasing me, but anytime I saw that old man with the bag out of the window I would run and hide. Which goes to show elders must be very careful what they tell youngsters.

[silverlib]

8. 18th months

When I was twelve, my mother brought out a green dress and cap she had saved from when I was eighteen months old. She apparently had scrimped and saved to buy it, as it was very expensive in it's day. I was able to tell her that I remembered wearing it. I described a hospital visit where the walls and the furniture were all green and the very elderly woman we had visited. I remembered walking down the "green" halls and into her "green" hospital room. My father was holding me. She nearly flipped. I don't remember being afraid, but it must have been a really strange experience or I would not have remembered.

Depending on your age, you may not remember when hospitals were green. I glad these places have been "brightened" over the years.

[wysimdnwyg]

9. Two or three

- The cat had kittens and had moved them to the top step down to the garage/basement.
- Getting mad and breaking one of my toys.
- Locking my bedroom door so my parents couldn't get in. (Dad actually climbed up a ladder outside my window.)
- My sister (two years older) learning to tie her shoes.
- Learning to dribble a ball.
- Having one of those balls with the handle that you sit on and bounce. (What are those things called?)
- Being allergic to chocolate.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

10. I was around a year old...

and I was sitting on the floor of my Grandma's kitchen as she was preparing dinner. She went to pull out cooking pots and pans, and I remember sitting there thing how much I hated that sound and wished there was someway to make her stop it. For me, the noise level was unbearably loud and the sound of metal hitting metal was actually physically painful for me. I was too young to figure out I could just put my hands over my ears to muffle the sound.

[Butterflies]

11. being ignored by my mother

age 3, I think. I was an unplanned baby, and she never really warmed up to my existence. We have no relationship now. Maybe that's too heavy for this lounge thread, but it's my earliest memory. :shrug:

[greatauntoftriplets]

12. No idea how old I was....

...but the toy soldier decals in my crib scared me. Went into a big bed at age 2.

[tridim]

13. Memories of dark green shag carpet

that smelled like pipe tobacco. Oddly enough, I hear that shag is coming back in vogue 30 years later.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

14. the dry cleaner's truck running over my babydoll "Sweetpea" circa 1953

it was in our grassy driveway in Miami i was 3 :cry: :cry: :cry:

[no_hypocrisy]

15. I remember using a scooter thing & the first time I walked by myself.

If this counts, I could go earlier. I tried soy milk for the first time a couple of years ago. My initial reaction was, "Yech, baby formula!" I asked my mother about my infant feeding and she said that I had been switched to soy formula when I was a few months old as I could not breastfeed because of her mastitis. So even though I could not put a word to my experience at the time, I remembered the taste and recognized my reunion with my formula.

[TrogL]

16. Standing under the kitchen table asking for cocoa

Which doesn't make me very tall.

[arwalden]

17. My 2nd Earliest Memory Is Using A Big Rock To Kill A Spider...

that was crawling on the GLASS window of our kitchen door. I was about 4 or 5.

Yes, it shattered. No, I was not cut. No, I did not kill the spider.

-- Allen

[bubblesby2002]

18. I have earlier ones....

....but this one sticks out and I remember it so clearly. When I was about 3 I was sitting on the small stoop of my grandparents' house. Three men wearing trench coats and fedoras with big brogues on their feet came up the path and someone in the house (my mother or my aunt) yelled "Jesus, it's the dicks!". My grandmother at the time was working off a debt to a bookie - she had a major gambling problem - by taking bets. And the detectives were there to arrest her. However, they never found any of the book slips, so they had to go away empty handed. To this day I have a major distrust of police and detectives. I still think my grandma was cool though.

[Lindsay]

19. I remember a trip to Cincinnati when I was 3.

It was a business trip for my dad, but my mother and I went along. The morning we left was cool and foggy. My dad was driving a 2-tone green Pontiac Chieftan with an Indian head hood ornament.

What I remember of Cincinnati was the very tall (well, I was very short) glass doors on the hotel, and a cigarette billboard across the street that blew actual smoke rings. I thought that was exceedingly interesting.

I also remember going with my dad to buy our first TV when I was 3 or 4.

[neebob]

45. For some reason this post reminded me of

stepping into an elevator at ZCMI (a department store in Salt Lake where my grandma worked) and being afraid I'd get sucked into the crack under the doors. No idea how old I was. I think it inspired a deep-seated fear of elevators, because I sometimes have dreams about elevators that don't do what they're supposed to do - they go sideways, upside down, and every which way; get stuck between floors, forcing me to crawl out through a tiny hole; or take me to unexpected places where I get stuck or lost.

[Cleita]

20. I was two when a kid I was playing with shoved me off my

grandmother's porch and I broke my arm fallin on it. I remember that, the trip to the hospital, and pretty much everything since then that were sort of life highlights.

The trouble is I often can't remember yesterday.

[neebob]

47. And how could I forget

My Aunt Bobbi (actually my grandma's sister, but that's what we called her) had a black dog named Pepper. I tripped over Pepper's chain in Aunt Bobbi's driveway and dropped my (glass) bottle, which I must have fallen on but I don't remember that part - only Pepper and the chain. They took me to a *GREEN* hospital, put me on a table, and sewed up a cut at the base of my neck.

"Get me off this ironing board," I'm told I cried. I do remember being stuck on this thing that seemed like an ironing board.

Now that I think about it, this is probably my earliest memory because I doubt my mother would have let me suck on a bottle after age 2.

[Rowdyboy]

21. When I was 3 we lived a block away from my grandparents....

My mom would walk me 1/2 way to a small store where I would wait for my granny to walk over and get me. They had a big yard with lots of flowers and a garden. We dug potatoes and picked butterbeans. They used a real plow to plow it up and I thought it looked really wierd. Granny's flowers smelled good too and they had a pomegranate tree by the back door, and a gold fish pool and .....

....Sorry, kinda got lost there for a minute. Its taken me at least 10 minutes to write this-my mind keeps drifting back...

[BurtWorm]

22. Lying on my arm and hearing the blood switching on and off in my ear

like a chain switch being pulled on and off, on and off, on and off. (I was also easily entertained.)

The sound of dogs around the neighborhood barking at twilight.

My twin brother and I climbing a dresser and sitting in the top drawer.

My brother and I being strapped into bed to keep us from climbing dressers.

When I told my mother I had this early memory of that climbing incident she said we couldn't have been more than a year and a half old.

[On the Road]

23. I Believe I Was Only One Year Old

or maybe 18 months. I was doing a somersault in the back yard of my uncle's house. We passed it many years later and he couldn't believe I remembered it.

Strangely enough, another of my earliest memories also involves doing a somersault.

Maybe there's something about the way young brains are wired that makes psychokinetic memories longer lasting. I read an article in my Psych major days by a guy called Ernest Shachtel in which he argued that the senses that important to a child are the ones closest to the physical body -- taste, smell, and touch. Like Prout's memories of the madeline. Adults rely more on vision, which puts things at a distance. Hearing is somewhere in between.

[spinbaby]

24. Watching dust

in a beam of sunlight.

Finding an electrical plug with nothing attached and plugging it in. A bolt of lightning struck. The black scar was still on the floor when we moved some years later.

Learning to bounce a ball.

The smell of coal smoke on a winter day.

Watching an older child climb onto a table to turn the hands of a cuckoo clock to make the bird come out.

Sitting in a car seat turning its steering wheel--car seats were baby entertainment, not safety equipment back then.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

35. My memories are similar...

the dust and the car seat especially...

I tried to put a penny in the electrical outlet and got quite a shock when it got close. So I did it again.

[BurtWorm]

58. I used to watch dust in sunbeams as well. For what felt like hours.

And I could also spend what felt like hours watching the curtains blow in and out of the open windows in early spring and realizing that some force was pulling them out, because there wasn't wind inside the house blowing them out.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

25. Waking up and asking "Where's Daddy?"

Mom would say "working". I didn't know what "working" was, only that it was the thing that kept Daddy away from me.

Or: awake at night in the crib, watching the car lights from the street run across the ceiling.

Or: Beach with Dad, hearing a plane overhead, trying to look but not being able to because of the sun. The waves (they looked HUGE). The tunnel that joins Botafogo to Copacabana, which we would cross by foot to get to the beach. Loud noise inside the tunnel.

Or: cartoons: The Impossibles, The Herculoids, Shazzam, Peter Potamus. Anime: 8th Man.

Or: in the batthub, deciding it would be a great idea if ALL of the bathroom was filled with water like the bathroom. Chaos ensues. My older sister says, "be easy, he doesn't know what he's doing". I was outraged, I DID know what I was doing. I had a plan and a purpose!

All of those, with certainty, before my 4th birthday. (On edit: probably older than 2 at all of those events, except maybe the car lights)

[Forkboy]

26. Watching the Bruins win the Stanley Cup in 1970

I was 3 and remember watching with my dad,and him getting all excited :)

[regnaD kciN]

37. If what you are saying is true...

...who was credited with the assist on the series-winning goal?

:evilgrin:

[Forkboy]

56. Derek Sanderson

But I knew that anyways :evilgrin:

[trackfan]

27. I remember being accidentally stuck with a diaper

pin while being changed. The next memory is of being in a crib in a dark room and being afraid of a siren I heard.

[progressiverealist]

28. a huge tree in my back yard

with exposed roots that you could climb on. I was about 3.

[AlienGirl]

29. 14 months old

Staying at my grandma's house while my mother was in the hospital with food poisoning. I was confused about where Mom was. I didn't want to eat anything but the raisins out of raisin bread, dipped in milk, and I wanted t drink milk with sugar in it--I had still been nursing, and I guess I was upset about being weaned.

Tucker

[damnraddem]

30. The dinosaurs were overrunning our cave ...

and we were never going to get the place ready for when the chimps came over for dinner.

[populistmom]

31. When I was 2

I remember playing in the park and having some sort of temper tantrum about something. It's all pretty vague.
Then there's my horrible memory of my brother getting beaten (I was almost 3, he was 1) by our babysitter that I try to get out of my head, but it haunts me. He soon developed epilepsy and severe brain damage/mental retardation and there's no other possible explanation except for what this woman did to him, but at the time I couldn't verbalize it and once we started putting it together, it was too late and too hard to prove. Ah yes, the joys of early traumatic experiences.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

36. Oh my god...

How awful!

[populistmom]

39. It was. It still is.

Thinking about it rather put my afternoon in the shitter today, but hey, I had therapy as a kid, so I guess it got most of it out. Made me a good mommy anyway, but I wouldn't trust anyone to take care of mine when they were babies. Something like that never completely leaves you.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

55. OMFG. All I'd want with a bitch like this is...

...a sealed room, a really loud stereo, some death metal CDs to help the mood and a crowbar.

[NightTrain]

61. Nothing like your earliest memory being traumatic, huh?

I've got one of my own from when I was three, but chose instead to share a more pleasant memory from that year.

[Whitacre D_WI]

32. Everything was dark and warm and safe.

Then next thing I knew, the harsh, cold light enveloped me; and I didn't even have my wits about me enough to scream. They wiped my face and brought out the instruments. Finally I began to howl:

"No! No!"

"My precious placenta!"

[SOteric]

33. I was 2 or 3.

I have a memory of a neighbour's dog (German Shepherd) 'sharing' my doll with me in the front yard. Apparently we often played happily together, but I've no idea what games went through our little puddin' heads.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

34. Several from ages 2-3

The sideboard was against some high windows, and I wanted to see out, so I pulled up a dining room chair and started walking on the sideboard. My mom, who had all sorts of heirloom china up there, screeched and pulled me off. She says I was two at the time.

My great-uncle, who was in the military in Germany, coming back with a cuckoo clock for my parents.

Going to the home of my other great-uncle, who has something I've never seen before: a TV. We watch Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

My mom hears something on the radio, runs to the phone, calls my grandparents and says, "Stalin died!" (My grandfather was Latvian, so this would have been momentous news.) I've checked the date, and I was not quite three.

My first brother is born. At age 3, I'm not allowed to visit in the hospital, so one of my mother's former teachers, who has remained friendly with her over the years, plays with me in the hospital lobby.

My dad is pastor of a small, impoverished church. His office is in an upstairs bedroom, and every Saturday night, I get to watch him mimeograph the Sunday bulletins, and sometimes he lets me turn the crank on the mimeograph machine.

[FDRrocks]

38. Christmas, age 3

My Gramps (with hope, I guess) bought me a miniature golf bag. My aunt put me inside of it, with a santas hat on, snapped a pictured. I loved it so much I spent the next 2 days in it. It was all furry inside!

[arwalden]

51. My Earliest Christmas Memories Include My Naps UNDER The Tree

I loved our Christmas tree SOOO much that I'd often take a sofa pillow and "scooch" under the tree as much as possible (before there were too many gifts) and get cozy on my pillow... looking up at the lights and enjoying the smell. I'd usually fall asleep (according to my mom).

I don't remember ever waking up under the tree, but I do remember crawling under the tree with the small pillow.

-- Allen

[F-5]

40. You'd be amazed at what I can remember.

I remember stuff up until I was a year old.

[neebob]

41. Sitting on the braided oval rug in our livingroom

and my dad saying, "You want somebody to play with?!" I must have said that. It was before my brother was born, which would have made me 2 or just barely 3.

I also remember telling my parents we should name the baby Dizzy Braunschweiger. My dad worked at a Safeway store and would bring home icky weird stuff like Braunschweiger and horehound (sp?) candy ...

Making Jiffy Pop with my dad while my mom was in the hospital having Dizzy B. and her waving out the window at me as I sat in Grandma's car outside the hospital. My dad must have gone in to visit or pick her up or something ...

Walking up to my dad in his tighty-whiteys, reaching up and pinching his, uh, package and getting a reaction that let me know I'd done something bad ...

Telling my dad I'd hidden these three squarish, chewy candies - caramels, maybe? - one for each of us that he'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard - in my stomach and getting in trouble ...

[One Taste]

42. My grandma was baby-sitting

me and I went outside and got the garden hose and shot it into the living room through the screen door.

[Rhiannon12866]

43. I remember my daddy holding me up so I could feed a bear through a chute

at an amusement park. I can't have been very old, but I that's about it.:shrug:

[sleipnir]

44. (Politically!) J. Jackson speaking at '84 Convention, I shit you not.

It's one of the earliest, succinect memories that I have. That man giving a speech and my parents watching the thing, odd but it's what's stuck with me as one of my earliest memories.

Odd, huh???? And quite timely (oh, I was only 4 at the time...)

That's my earliest political memory

[MisterP]

46. 3, sitting in a gazebo with my Dad, looking at the pond

some memories of our duplex we got after that, and two dreams (family friend peering through the casement window, and running in fear from something, to be blocked by those adjustable doorway fences).

[neebob]

48. I really enjoyed this thread, arwalden.

Great idea! Now I need to go to bed. Nighties!

[arwalden]

50. You know... I Have Enjoyed It Too...

Reading about these earliest memories (and all the differences) has been very interesting.

-- Allen

[solinvictus]

49. About 18 months- 2 years old.

I have memories of getting excited when I could see my grandparent's house in the distance. Another specific one; I nearly choked to death on a slice of American cheese. I wouldn't eat cheese for years after that.

[slinkerwink]

52. I have memories of climbing out of my crib---can't have been more

than a year and a half old. I remember falling onto my diaper, and crying because my butt hurt from the fall from the crib.

An earlier memory than that has me crawling on the rug underneath my grandmother's dining table, but my long red baby nightie was preventing me from crawling well.

Also, another memory was when I was 3 years old and seeing my mother at the front of the deaf school with my older brother. I also remember a teacher stepping on my toe. She broke my toe and I had to go to the hospital. I was very frightened because all the doctors and nurses had masks on. I didn't know what was going on.

[trof]

53. It was dark and warm.

Then I remember being forced through a narrow opening into incredibly bright lights and somebody whacked me on the butt and then I blacked out for a couple of years.
;-)

[slinkerwink]

54. lol

[jimbo fett]

57. I was a soldier in the Roman army. About 52 AD I think....

[ronnykmarshall]

59. Being in the hospital

When I was 2 I went into convulsions and had to be hospitalized. All I can remember is being in a oxygen tent with cool air pumped in to lower my fever. My mom was trying to find me and was running down the hall. I must have been in ICU, because I can remember seeing her running down the hall and finding me.

She also brought a picture of my aunt's dog and put it my bed.

I thought maybe I had dreamed this, but year ago I was talking to my mom about what I remembered and she was shocked that I knew this.

[NightTrain]

60. When I was three (1969) and had the Russian flu

I can remember my father sitting in a rocking chair and cuddling me to his chest in a vain attempt to make me feel better. The radio played softly in the background. I specifically recall hearing Glen Campbell's "Galveston."

[Bertha Venation]

62. The only great thing my father ever did for one of his children.

I know I sound bitter, but I'm not; this is how we discuss my father.

I don't know how old I was. I was in the back seat of his car with my sisters. We were driving somewhere. Suddenly my favorite toy, a stuffed doll all in read with a pointy hat and a sewn-in plastic face, was outside the car on the road. My dad turned the car around and went back to get the toy.

[geniph]

63. Getting pushed off the porch and splitting my kneecap

I remember the broken glass and a lot of blood, and much screaming. I was about 2-1/2, and my 12-year-old sister pushed me off the 6-foot porch because I'd flushed her Barbie doll's head down the toilet. I landed on broken glass and split my kneecap. It's my first memory. I still have the scar, 42 years later.

My second memory is nicer; a little later that year, I learned to read, and I still remember the epiphany of figuring out that's what those black marks on the pages of the Cat In The Hat were...that's where the story was!

[Rhiannon12866]

66. We have a lot in common

I lost my Barbie doll's head in Lake George when I was a kid. I was having her "swim" and she just came up without it. They must not have secured the heads on very well.:shrug:

Also, "The Cat in the Hat" was the very first book that I ever read on my own. It was a Saturday morning and I felt so very grown up, at age five or six, to be able, like you, to understand what those words on the page meant.:-)

[camero]

64. I was 3 and in West Virginia

Coming back from a trip to California. I walked up to a fence at a wildlife preserve and a fawn walked up to the fence and licked my hand. In 1970.

[noonwitch]

65. I remember getting lost at Hudson's when I was two

I also remember MLK and RFK's assassinations, when I was about 3, because my mom was so sad.