What is your earliest memory?

[Bertha Venation]

I am digging the "best memory of childhood" thread. Let's go with this, too, for a while.

[applegrove]

1. I can remember being pushed in a carriage down the walkway of our house. I can also

remember looking sideways from my crib and seeing what I know to be my twin brother in his as a baby/toddler. I can remember getting my own bedroom when I was three. Many more memories from when I was 4.

[angstlessk]

31. I vaguely remember my crib, but the memory is jumping around round robin style

with my older sister from the crib to the dresser to the other bed in the room and around and around..must have been maybe 3?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. I had to be between 14 and 17 months old. I hadn't walked yet...

I was crawling down a hallway in my grandmother's house, towards a door with glass panes and a faceted glass doorknob. I tried to reach the doorknob, but it was too far away...

I started to cry.

Someone showed up on the other side of the door, and came through it to pick me up.

I actually told my mom about this, and she confirmed it.

We also thought the reason I remembered it was because it was traumatic.

[LaurenG]

3. Being handed to a STRANGER at base chapel and crying

when my parents went to church. The lady sat me on the ground and rolled a ball to me which made the place much nicer until she included my older sister in the game. I was about 9 months old and couldn't walk yet.

[angstlessk]

32. I do not ever remember crying as a baby/child

I do recall my father drinking beer in a very low slung chair and putting his beer on the floor and me, reaching around the chair and stealing a sip or two...till he either caught me or I got too drunk to continue..and went to bed!..I was such a bad baby!

[HereSince1628]

4. Of my dachshund standing next to me on his hind legs at the screen door...he was taller then me. n/

[mulsh]

5. I remember batting the bird mobile above my crib.

I told my mom about that when I was in my 20's. She didn't believe me until I told her the color of each of the 6 birds. She said they got rid of the mobile when I was about 6 months old.

Around the same time the old gun powder factory in San Leandro, CA about a mile or so away from our house blew up. I remember both times that place blew up. Those events happened sometime between 1957 & 1960.

I have pretty consistent memories from around the age of 5-6 month on. Of course as I hit my 50's my short term memory is mercifully vague.

My twin brother's memories start for him around the time we were 4 years old. He has a difficult infancy but made up for it as teenager.

[Bertha Venation]

6. I was probably three years old.

Our dad had us (the 'rents had split up when I was two). We were driving down the road, and I dropped my favorite toy -- a stuffed red and white striped thing with a plastic baby face -- out the car window. He turned the car around and got out and picked it up and gave it back to me.

[RebelOne]

7. When Pearl Harbor was attacked.

I was 3 years old and my parents told me that Pearl Harbor was attacked, and I thought Pearl was a girl, and I remember being sad for her.

[goclark]

25. Remember crawling across the floor at about 2

I was at my grandmother's house in Pittsburgh.

There was a penny on the floor and I picked it up and made it roll . I played with the penny for a while and was completely fascinated when it rolled again and again.

My grandmother was in the next room.

I don't remember her being upset with me.

I remember so many fond memories of my Grandmother.

Thankyou for asking us to share.

[HeiressofBickworth]

8. My mother's parents had a small farm in Indiana

I vaguely recall my grandfather taking me to the hen house and letting me pick up eggs. Also around this same time, I remember being handed a small pail to go pick strawberries for dinner. I sat in the strawberry patch and ate the strawberries instead. My grandfather died when I was 3 and my grandmother sold the farm shortly after that so I'd say these memories were around age 3. And yes, strawberries are still my favorite fruit.

[Brickbat]

9. I have memories of being two and "helping" my mom play the piano.

[trof]

10. Stepping on a broken milk bottle circa 1943.

Right in the instep.
Lucky I didn't get a tendon.
ER, stitches.
Still got the scar.
I was about 2.

[rufus dog]

11. And you never stepped on a broken milk bottle again

DID YA!

[trof]

12. Betcher ass I didn't.

[rufus dog]

14. LOL

Saw the year it occurred and could deduce your age and knew you had heard that before.

[Kaleva]

13. I remember a bear rug in a bedroom.

I was telling my parents about remembering that and they were amazed considering how young I was at the time we lived at that particular house.

[NightWatcher]

15. I was shot out of a canon, then I swam for the longest time

It was all kinda fuzzy for the next several months. Then some dude grabbed my head and yanked me out into this bright ass room. Everyone talked to me like I was an idiot.

[sakabatou]

16. It must've been before Nickelodeon.

I think I remember some stuff on the Pinwheel Network.

[hunter]

17. I remember my dad carrying me at Pacific Ocean Park.

My mom says I was 7 months old.

I remember they dug up the septic tank and put in city sewers at our house. From our living room window I watched the backhoe and men with shovels digging . My mom was terrified I'd fall in the hole and drown since I'd just started walking and opening doors. My dad took me outside and held me up so I could see the bottom of the pit. (Maybe he didn't tell my mom!) Similar smells still bring back that memory...

I remember what pill bugs and snails taste like. I sampled a few while my mom was gardening. (I haven't tested that memory as an adult.)

I remember my dad and my grandpa replacing the garbage disposal in the kitchen. They were not happy. I imagine they were cussing, but I didn't talk yet. I remember trying to move the old garbage disposal which was sitting on the floor on a bunch of newspapers but it was too heavy. I remember I hated the noise of the garbage disposal. I still do.

[femmocrat]

18. I can remember my mother bringing my baby brother home from the hospital.

I was almost 2 years old.

[pintobean]

19. I don't remember

Getting older sucks.

[DearHeart]

20. Riding my tricycle in the basement

during the winter when I was 2!

[prole_for_peace]

21. I remember trying to ride our standard poodle, Gigi

and she apparently didn't appreciate it very much. She snapped at me and I fell and bit through my lip.

I really only remember trying to ride her and then later crying and running next door to my grandmother's house where my mom was at the time. I was about 16 months old or so

[Silver Swan]

22. I was less than two

Because we moved from the house I remember before that.

My two older sisters and I were sitting, or maybe bouncing on a bed, and the handle was broken off my rattle.

I still had the rattle, minus the handle, many years later.

[bluesbassman]

23. The JFK assassination. I was four.

My mom was in a daytime bowling league, and they had a play area there for the kids. My mom came and got me, walked me to where we could see a television mounted on the wall that was broadcasting the chaotic aftermath. She held me firmly by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and said that the president had been killed. She wasn't hysterical, jut looked very sad and had tears rolling down her cheeks.

[HopeHoops]

24. Eating Quisp at an apartment I no longer remember.

[angstlessk]

26. At age 4 begging for cash for a soda and snack from the workers at my fathers

cleaners...knowing full well I was going to us the mammon for a bus trip...which led me to being lost and in a police car till they found the cleaners from which I had come...it was quite a trip..sans drugs!

[Bertha Venation]

27. At four years of age? Woo hoo!!

Fun!

[angstlessk]

29. I remember from the time I paid my nickle till I ran across the field in fear

of my mother beating my butt...every detail..which would bore most humans...but I still find amazing!...today..there would be law suits! The bus driver ALLOWED me (at age 4) go get on the bus then MADE me get off at the end of the line...LAW SUIT!

[angstlessk]

28. Then there was the time before that..(still age 4) when I went to the store to purchace

cigarettes, but I needed my mothers note, not having said note, I decided to purchase a cigar, which did NOT require a mothers note..and so I proceeded to light up the stogie in a field adjacent to the place my mother worked...which had a very large glass window overlooking the exact place I smoked my stogie?

Never got caught...perhaps wanted to?

Precocious is an understatement of my early childhood!

[Turbineguy]

30. Sitting on the stairs in the hallway

in our house watching life go on. I think it was before I was 2.

[Gore1FL]

33. I remember being held by my mother

I was in diapers and recognized that I was getting bigger. It may have been my first moment of self-awareness.

[TrogL]

34. Standing under the kitchen table demanding hot chocolate

[LiberalEsto]

35. Being held by my mother or grandmother

and pointing to a flower in the wallpaper pattern and saying "Lilsh", which is a baby version of lill, the Estonian word for flower. And my mom and grandmother got so excited about saying my first word. I was about 9 months old at the time. For some odd reason my memory goes back really far. Didn't speak English until age 5.

[Swede]

36. Being stung by a bee at 3 years old.

We were on the farm (we moved into town when I was 3,so that's how I know how young I was).

[justgamma]

37. I remember going to the Grandparents house.

I would crawl to the wastebasket by their TV and tip it over. After that, whenever we went there, the basket would get put up on the counter. If she forgot, I would crawl over and try to hand it to her. I wasn't a year old yet.

[GReedDiamond]

38. I was sitting on the front lawn, right about this time of the season...

...the lawn was like an infinite neon green panorama...

Just like a cgi set, except it was, like, 1956-and-a-half...

All that has followed is the stuff of an unwritten screenplay, still being not written.

[blueamy66]

39. on a turnpike in Buffalo

that would be my earliest memory......best memory......the smell of french fries on Waikiki Beach

[Arkansas Granny]

40. I don't know how old I was, exactly. The memory is like a snapshot, but when I described it,

my mother said it was from a house we lived in when I was just an infant until I was about 2 1/2 years old. I'm sitting on the floor and in a room that seems kind of dark. I can see bright daylight in two windows that are on either side of an open doorway. I can tell that the yard outside the doorway slopes down steeply. There is a silouette of a woman with a broom in the doorway.

[hobbit709]

41. Going through the checkpoints of the different occupation zones in Vienna

My mother was Austrian but even as a baby I had an American passport. We lived in the American sector but most of my relatives lived in the Soviet one. Every time we crossed from one to the other had to show papers. My first passport had quite an impressive collection of stamps on the pages. This ended when I was five as Austria became a neutral country and was no longer occupied.

[Art_from_Ark]

42. I think my earliest memory is when I was 2 years old

I was rinding in the car my grandmother was driving, in the front seat with no child restraint, and my grandmother suddenly stopped and I hit my head against the dashboard. Apparently no permanent injury resulted from that mishap.

I have a few more memories when I was 3, and then at 4 the memories really start to kick in.

[undeterred]

43. Eating soup with the oyster crackers on top at the counter of a diner in Chicago when I was 3.

[Myrina]

44. ... seeing my feet walking on the ceiling ...

.... my oldest brother apparently used to hold me upside down (I was 2, maybe 3?) and "walk" me across the living room ceiling.

[alphafemale]

45. Still in the crib. Standing up in it and seeing my dad with his arm cradling my mom.

The moon was shining in. My feet were kind of sweaty. I was in a full body terry sleeper with footies when a pair of training pants and an undie shirt would have been plenty.

[Old Troop]

46. Sticking a wire hanger into the electrical outlet

at my grandmother's house. Probably around 3 yo.

[greatauntoftriplets]

47. My crib had a decal of toy soldiers that scared me....

and I would close my eyes so I couldn't see them. I was about one year old.

[Little Star]

48. In a car with my mother & father, in the dark....

It was in New Haven, CT and for some reason I think we had been to the grocery store because I vaguely remember a grocery cart.

I remember the other car lights and what must have been street lights.

I think I was less than a year old.

The memory and feeling is still very vivid. But it feels weird when I happen to think about it.

[blue neen]

49. My son says...

his earliest memory is of me shooting rubber bands at the TV anytime Ronald Reagan was on! Yes, my son was born in the 80's!

[Angleae]

50. Being in my playpen.

I was about 2 and bored as hell. I really didn't like my playpen.

[Rochester]

51. Farting

I was looking out the window at the sun reflecting off the snow on the ground.

[NickB79]

52. Hiding in a gutter of manure in the dairy barn with my mom

A tornado was approaching, and it was the only place to take shelter.

[raccoon]

53. My tribe went to visit a tribe of Neanderthals over the river and through the woods. nt

[Throckmorton]

54. My two cousins coming to live with us after their mother died, their father had died 3 years earlier

It was 2 weeks before my 2nd birthday. They were both older, all of 6 and 11, and both loved with us until they were 18. The younger one and I are still very close, and proved invaluable when dealing with my own two children after their mother died 8 years ago. Nothing like first hand experiance.

[Honeycombe8]

55. Bits of dancing class...I would've been age 3 or 4.

But I don't remember my age. I just remember parts of the class, and I know about how old I was when I took those classes.