What is your earliest memory?

I was 4 years old. We were at the beach and watching fireworks, sitting on a log. I remember falling off of that log. Such a really nothing memory, but it really is my earliest memory.

I drank pipeline cleaner acid when I was four. That’ll make an impression on you.

My second oldest memory is when I was 2 I looked inside the toilet lid and dropped it on the toilet tank and shattered it . The water was spraying the bathroom. My oldest memory is when I was one and I said, ” hello how are you?” to a baby sitter.

I was 4 years old, dreaming being chased by some tree monster in a wood. No on was there with me. Everything was dark.

@Mimishu1995 I’d be there with you. We’d kick his ass.

swimming lessons when I was 4. I’m 24, so that was around ‘95

swimming lessons are good. We go into the water for any reason it’s nice to be able to swim.

I was 3. I remember my mom putting my sister in the crib and I asked why the pillow was under the mattress. She told me it was safer for the baby.

Also, around age 3 or 4 being in nursery school and making my hand print in a circle of clay.

My earliest memories start at 2, but I don’t know the order of them. In one of them, my sister stood me up in the toilet bowl and then tried to flush me. Shortly after that is when I started realizing that if I squeezed a little turd out, I’d get the bathtub all to myself. Not even kidding. I have no idea how many times I did it. But her screaming in terror and jumping out of the tub, only to have me fling the little turd across the bathroom at her to elicit more delightful terror, is not a memory I’ll ever forget. :D

Nursery school, I think. Several memories endure including taking naps, a musical play the class put on (I still have the flyer), and being made to sit alone at the far end of the playground because I refused to share a new birthday present, toy binoculars, with another kid. I also think I can still sort of recall the face of the teacher who made me do it.

I was 2. I was standing up in my crib. It had yellow painted wooden slats. On the wall above my crib was a print of one of those little girls like on the Northern Tissue packages. This is the one. I loved that picture.

@Kardamom… lovely.

@Pachy Guess what? I found 2 of those Northern tissue prints, including the one we had, at a thrift store about 3 years ago. They were in those 60’s era white plastic “French provincial” looking frames that were popular back then. I was so excited when I saw them! They don’t really go with my decor, so they’re safely packed away in a storage box under my bed.

2½, riding in the car on Green Street in San Francisco, going to pickup my brother from school at St Vincent De Paul’s, and a firetruck came speeding up behind us, as fast as it could, siren blaring and honking its airhorn because my mother couldn’t pull over. I thought it was going to run right over us. Freaked me out.

3 years old in Chicago. I don’t know the exact order of the memories, and as for the accuracy- well let’s just say that I loved going to bed, because in the middle of the night a full sized steam locomotive would chug full throttle next to my bed. I would sit in the bed and watch the drive wheels churn as the wonderful and noisy machine ran furiously but moved not an inch forward. I remember telling my parents more than once about the marvel in my bedroom, but for the life of me, I can’t recall a single explanation from either of them. I do remember the bemused looks.

@DrasticDreamer You are so evil. I wish I thought of that when I was young. It has so many possible uses.

When my dad backed over my tricycle that I’d parked behind his car in the driveway. I was three.

Being in diapers.

Trying to tell my mother something, but she couldn’t understand me because my diction was so poor. She’d say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.” So I’d say it again. It went on and on until I finally had a tantrum. Then she picked me up and dumped me in my crib. I screamed until I fell asleep and woke up angry, so I screamed some more.

Just read @Kardamom. I remember my crib as well. Wooden, ivory enamel paint, with little pictures of lighthouses and seagulls here and there. I really loved those pics. I must have been about two.

I remember looking through the crib bars out at the stairwell banister going downstairs. We moved from that apartment when I was 2.

About age three – playing with my dolls under the dining room table.

Just before my third birthday, my dad and family friends were building our house. The day I remember, they had hung the kitchen cabinets and I put a nail into the wall.
A little later that year I remember taking a walk with the neighbor Sue (she was about 5) through the vacant lots and before they built cinder block walls in the neighborhood separating the lots.

My dad picking me up to look in the bassinet to see my newborn sister. I was 3. I clearly remember thinking, ”That’s what all the fuss is about? It’s just a baby!” Maybe I was expecting a unicorn or something really cool. Not a regular old baby. :(

It must have been when I was two or three. The memories were of standing up in the crib and being able to see the tree tops out of the window across the room. The wooden crib had a yellow plastic cap on the top bar of the rails. The cap was in two pieces, and where they met was a seam. The corners of the two pieces were sharp.

Above the crib was a rectangular hole in the wall at ceiling level. There was a yellow piece of fluff hanging out of it that would sometimes dance about. It was scary. Years later, I learned that the family moved into the house before all of the construction work was completed. The hole was for an air-conditioning duct. The fluff was insulation. The vent covers weren’t installed until several months later.

I remember being 3. Our family moved from Indiana when I was 3, and I remember our Indiana house and the neighbors.

Think it was around three, my brother and I used to love to race our tricycles around the kitchen table just before dinner used to drive mom crazy.

Moving into our new house when I was 2. I don’t remember anything about the old house, but I remember (before mandatory car seats or seat belts) standing in the middle of the seat in the pickup truck, watching as we backed in over the yard, on the walk up to the step of the porch. I also remember someone saying that the truck had cracked the sidewalk. The crack in the sidewalk eventually eroded, and we had to replace the sidewalk about ten or twelve years later. That would be 64 years ago.

Yeah, I remember Mom throwing her arm across me when she had to stop suddenly because we didn’t have seat belts. SEAT BELTS! WHAT A CONCEPT!

Hanging out the back window of our station wagon….

I was 3 and I was running out of a burning apartment building with my three big brothers.

@Kardamom my mom had a set of four of those Northern Tissue Girls hanging up in our family room like you, I loved those pictures.

Oh how scary @FlyingWolf!

I have several very early memories, and I don’t have any way of knowing which ones chronologically came before the others. In most of the memories, I’m either not quite three or barely three. I’ll just tell the one that I picked sort of at random between all the others to be the first.

I was at my cousin’s grandma’s house (the grandma we don’t share by blood) and we were supposed to be napping but we were jumping on the bed instead. My cousin, who was two at the time, fell off the bed and smacked his head into the wall. It hurt badly, but he was too scared to cry because we’d get in trouble for jumping on the bed. She opened the bedroom door and said, “I told you kids not to jump on that bed!”

I was alone in the dark. I started experiencing anxiety. I felt like I was going to suffocate. I had to get out, but I was clueless. I started stomping my feet. My anxiety grew, and I got a terrible headache. Suddenly there were bright lights in my face. Somebody was screaming at me, and then I got smacked on my tender little bottom. I didn’t even do anything wrong!
I started to cry. Everyone seemed content with that. They gave me a bath, bundled me up, and fed me. No more spanking me.

@Here2_4 Laughs, you are a lunatic.

@Here2_4 It sounds like you might have been suffering from a severe migraine. I used to get those before I was old enough to talk, and then up until I was about 5 or 6 and not able to verbalize to my parents what was happening. They just thought I was freaking out for no reason. It felt like boulders were coming down on my head and any sounds or light or being touched made it worse.

I stopped having them when I was still very little, until I was in 7th grade and I had one at school. They still didn’t think anything was wrong with me, other than having some sort of a fit, or crying for no reason.

Then, when I was 18 years old, I had what I hope was my last severe migraine. I had all of the exact symptoms that I had had all those years ago, complete with the sense of boulders crushing my head, and this feeling of panic, and and a really bad headache, and this condition called Aphasia (global type). I also had the aphasia when I was a kid, but because I wasn’t fully verbal at 2, 3, 4 and 5 years of age, they just thought I was wigging out for no reason and couldn’t speak clearly. I was diagnosed with a severe migraine at the age of 18. At first they thought I had had a stroke, but then they said it was a migraine, with the aura and all of that business. I have not had one since then and I am now 51 years old. I’m still crossing my fingers that I never have another one. It was scary as shit to not be able to talk, and to not be able to “see” words.

@Kardamom , that sounds like more suffering than any child should have to experience. I am truly sorry for your pain, and the emotional pain of not being understood.
I feel a need to say more, but I can’t find the words. I just hope life has given you rewards to balance out the hard parts.

@Here2_4 That was an insight. Sounds like you were simply scared of the dark, like many kids are. It puts it in a whole new light (ha ha) to share with us how you felt as a tiny kid. I have always addressed kids being afraid of the dark, in one way or another, and never by ignoring them.
Some people don’t understand that a kid’s fears, even imaginary, are every bit as real and scary to us as our grown up fears.

Oh, how horrible @Kardamom. It is so very sad that kids can’t communicate to adult satisfaction….

Nobody needs to diagnose my trauma. What I wrote was a farcical memoir of my birth.

OIC.

I posted this question because I was thinking about my earliest memory. I talked to my mother a few years before she died and we figured out it must have been when I was 6–9 months old because I distinctly remember sitting up, and it was before we moved to Oregon because I was facing a fireplace and when I described it to her she said it was the one we had in New Mexico.
I had a little panic attack because I realized I was forgetting things. I, at that time, tried to think back to the first thing I remembered and realized that there must be things I had forgotten. I made a decision that If I forgot everything else, I would remember that moment in time. I remember sitting in front of a brick fireplace, but that’s about all I remember about my surroundings. Mostly I remember being determined to remember that moment.
Funny thing is, now, I am extremely forgetful and scatterbrained. The iPhone has changed my life dramatically by helping me keep track of appointments and things I should do.