What childhood images or situations were your "very first" as "memory" essentially began for you?

no shit, a plane ride from Germany to the US when I was one. I remember sitting on the right side of the cabin, and a clear vinyl carry-on bag with yellow flowers my mother had Juicy Fruit gum in.

@jholler: you have a great memory bro!

I remember being in my crib looking at my Hey Diddle-Diddle mobile thinking of the rhyme. I was told that I got my bed around my first birthday so it had to be just before that..
I also remember when my bed was delivered. I remember the delivery people bringing it into the garage instead of the house as it was nude and had to be painted.
Although I don’t remember President Kennedy’s assasination, I remember our family watching the funeral on TV. That would have been about three weeks shy of my second birthday.
After that I can’t remember anything until my fifth birthday.

I remember that we had a lady who helped my mum twice a week called maureen and one day she bought her son (aged about 5?) and he was naughty and she smacked his legs. When my dad came home i told him ‘Steven got smacked” and my dad was shocked because it was my first ever sentence – I was about one. And then my dad said ‘who did’ and I told him ‘maweeeeen” After that I started talking alot.
Remember aswel finding a toad, and making it a den in my bedroom and my mum (who found it) telling me it had ‘run away’
– guess i was about three.
strangely from age 2 to 3 I had an invisible friend called a little daddy who was about three inches high and looked like my dad, was very real to me and I took him everywhere and got upset when I thought mum had vaccumed him up, – once I made her open the vaccum bag so i could rescue him.If if we went shopping I would get home and tell my mum that we had left my little daddy at the shop, and i would get very upset until she pretended that someone had bought him home or something. Luckily I suddenly forgot about him but even now I can remember having him and that he wore a red t shirt.

I was three when my family still lived in Detroit, so I have to be younger than that for this memory. My grandma had a patch of chives in her garden and I remember sitting down in it, eating them and stinking of chive-smell.

Misty watercolored memories, of the way we werrrrrrre…

The furthest back I can remember is just this scene of being inside a small room at the hospital, the doctor lifting me up and placing me on the bed and then getting the stethoscope out to listen to my heart beat.

This is the honest to god truth, not one of those things where you build the memory from being told about it, because no one had ever told me about this and when I asked, mum was very shocked, because it was when I had gastro at 18 months old.

The earliest memory I can remember is when I was probably under the age of 5, but older then 4. Every morning for decades, I would wake, walk upstairs sit on the coach and get waffles made for me. Well, anyway, long story-short, I remember waking one morning, coming upstairs and having my grandmother tell me I would be starting school in a few weeks. I had no idea what she was talking about, I never heard of this “school” she was speaking of. The next immediate memory I have after that is the orientation, then the horror of knowing I would be there for 13+ years.
What sparked this? Your question. I tried as hard as I could to remember anything else, but the only thing that came to mind… HOLY CRAP! Wait I think I remember something else:
It could be that I am remembering a picture, or the real thing… no wait, thinking about it more, I realize I remember a picture. I have faugh images of the person in the picture, but no direct memories.
The only other thing that comes to mind is a memory I have of our old dog who’s name I do not remember, but I do remember her being hard of hearing and having the biggest fluffiest coat of golden hair (she was a golden retriever that never retrieved anything but dead birds.)

I don’t remember my very first memory, but I know that all of the first memories that I can recall like it was yesterday start when I was 2. I can recall entire days and clothes that people were wearing, and what was even said. It amazes almost everyone that I talk to about it, but I don’t see the big deal.

The earliest memory that I can date was when on sunny day I was walking on the driveway of our house before my father had re-landscaped the front yard and announcing proudly to my father that “I am fee!” while holding up three fingers. We lived in a very foggy spot so it had to be in the mid-summer, probably shortly after my third birthday.

I also remember being forced to “take a nap” at a church nursery school, which, according to my mother, I attended the year that I was three. We lay on blankets on the floor, which was most uncomfortable because it was so chilly.

I also remember the excitement of the day “Daddy tried to blow up the big rock.” This was during the summer that I turned four, when he was re-landscaping the front yard. The rock defeated all his efforts so in the end he dug a whopping great hole and levered the rock into it.

Woe betide anyone who ever tries to plant a tree in that spot – they won’t get very far.

I have some other memories of being in some sort of swing on a shady porch watching patches of sun somewhere that feel earlier to me, but I don’t know how early. We didn’t have a porch like that in the first few houses I remember but have been told we had one in the house where I was born.

Waking up in my crib in my mother’s bedroom.