What is your earlest memory as a child and how old were you?

This popped in my head last night. I was looking at baby toys for a friend and I saw this plastic hammer and screw driver set. It brought back this memory of my mother telling us kids if we get out of our beds the monster under the couch will get us. I believe I was four years old.
I remember going downstairs the next morning and looking under the couch, and there they were, a plastic hammer and screw drive toy.

 

I remember having lunch with my mom at an ice skating rink that burned down when I was 4. She verified that we went there fairly frequently.

I have very vivid memories of the Kennedy assassination. I would have been 6, I remember teachers sobbing and being sent home from school.

 

I have quite a few specific memories of the house we lived in before my brother was born. The earliest, I think, was waking up and not being able to open my eyes (this was a semi-frequent problem when I was really small. Hayfever/allergy related, I think.) I made my way, entirely by memory and touch, out of my bed, down the hall, and into Mom & Dad's room. Mom got a warm washcloth for my eyes, and a glass of apple juice.

I don't remember exactly how old I was, but there was still a safety rail on my bed, and we moved out of that house when I was three.

 

i dont know whether my earliest memory is a dream or not. some of it clearly is. some of it is not. i remember being in my crib in the apartment that my parents rented in beverly massachusetts, where there is, seemingly, something funny about the water. i remember looking through the rails at the gray wall opposite. i think i remember other details, but they're foggy. lately for the writing game i have trained myself to not fill things in with memory like this because i am interested in how the holes creep in, what gets erased, where erasure stops. but i think there was something hanging over me, a mobile maybe. i remember a suspension bridge in the wall, something like the brooklyn bridge. maybe there was a picture? i can't imagine making that up. the dreamier aspect of the memory is the sense of depth to the picture, like the wall was infinitely deep and small people were walking into that depth along the bridge.

that's consistent with the belief i had as a child that the music you could hear on the radio was produced by tiny bands that were inside the radio itself. i used to wonder what happened to them when you changed the station. i remember this would come up when i was in my mother's corvair. it was a strange shade of green. the radio had push buttons and silver knobs. i wouldn't like it when my mother changed the station because i thought something bad would happen to the group of tiny musicians.

another memory from when i was little was triggered much later by the smell of ivory soap. i remember being in my grandmother's kitchen. there were rounded shelves at the end of the counter. a brown radio was on the second shelf. i remember that i could look straight at the radio, so was at the time very short.

 

I can recall my sisters birth. She's three years younger than I so it is easy to determine how old I was unlike other memories I have from childhood. I have some recollections but no idea how old I was at the time.

 

I can definitely remember my baby brother coming home from the hospital after he was born.
I was 4 at the time.
I feel quite confident that's an actual memory.
There are other things I think I can remember but I have this suspicion that they are memories placed in my head by my parents talking about them, not my actual own process of memory formation.

 

most of my earliest memories of being in atlanta are sketchy and disparate. i couldn't begin to associate any one memory with an age. therefore, I have no idea which one might have come first. all of these would have occurred before the age of seven, that's the best i can do. i don't think I have any infant memories.

I remember:
walking across the lawn at night and staring up at the stars and experiencing what were then frightening realizations of insignificance and loneliness.
peeing my bed at night and going to sleep with my mom and dad.
my sister and I, somehow, breaking a gigantic mirror...we were jumping on beds or something.
our maid putting my hair up in rollers and watching creature from the black lagoon movies on saturday afternoons.
speaking of the maid, Ruby, I remember how close I was to her and how much i loved her. and her cooking.
dancing on top of my dad's ginormous speakers to the bridge over troubled water album.
getting out of bed at night during my mom's parties to lie down under the chair of her friend the folk singer while he played guitar.
driving to the Sir Pizza with my brother and sister in my dad's little MG with the top down. they cut the pizza into little squares.
and, of course, sitting in the front seat and rolling our town and country station wagon down the inclined driveway and through the back of the two-car garage. never will live that one down.

 

I was 1 and a half. I remember this because it was somewhat startling. My Mother, sister and I went to across the street to visit our neighbor. Inside this house, you had to step down into a den. Upon the walls, hung an assortment of wild animal heads. Wild cats, boars and antelope. My mother later confirmed that the neighbor was an avid hunter.

I remember feeling my mother’s stomach while she sat very pregnant on the black Barcelona style couch. She wore a reddish, blue checkered shirt. I remember details about my brother’s birth. I was four. He was red faced and ugly. I hated him, passionately as he lied sprawled out like a flailing alien on my Mother’s chartreuse bedspread.
Prior to his birth, my parents bought my sister and I gifts to soften the blow. My gift was a Wizard of Oz record. I hated the thought of this new kid stealing my shit so much that I took a red crayon and scribbled all over the record cover.

HA! Take that!

 

I remember sitting on Grampsie's lap. Grampsie was my mom's grandfather. He died before my third birthday.
There were inflatable swans we played with at the beach at my parents cottage. I was told once that those swans were destroyed by playing on the rocks the first full summer we spent at that cottage. I was not yet 2 that summer. The lake was dammed up & the beach flooded before I turned 4. I still miss that beach, & I'm 55 now.
My mom called me over to feel my baby sister moving in her belly when she was pregnant. When my sister came home from the hospital after being born my mom presented me with a shiny new toy firetruck & told me my sister had brought it for me because she was so excited to be meeting her brother for the first time (1962 - you rarely visited newborns in the hospital if you were a little kid with a busy dad). In my head I remember thinking "yeah, right - this new baby had nothing to do with this cool truck. You are trying to make me feel better about bringing her home". But it was a really cool firetruck & I didn't get good stuff like that too often so I kept my mouth shut. When playing I banged it into the coffee table whereupon I was warned that "Bethie" would take my truck back. I remember thinking it would really be my mom that would be taking my toy away and blaming the baby for the deed. Seeing as I got regularly blamed for stuff my older sibs had done it made sense, but I kept my mouth shut so I could keep the firetruck. I'm 3 1/2 years older than my sister so one of these memories would be from when I was younger than that.
I remember going the spring before I started kindergarten to be registered in the school gymnasium. I was 4 and a bit then. Kindergarten was a whole other story. 'Nuff said about that place.

 

Speaking of toy hammers... This isn't my memory but a story my mom told us kids.
When my mom brought me home from the hospital, my brother didn't want me, so he took his toy hammer and tried to whack me upside the head.
Luckily my cousin was in the room at the time and grabbed the hammer from him.

Onto my memories...
I can remember climbing out of my crib to escape confinement. I had to've been around 2.
I remember driving with my dad to pick my mom up at the nursing home where she worked and being fascinated by the new curbs they were putting in around the building. I was about 3, I believe.
Around that same time I remember going with my mom to take my dad a plate of food at the charcoal plant he worked at.
I had never seen him at work before, before he got most of the coal dust off him, and then not being able to tell which one was my daddy was a little weird to my young mind.
My next vivid memory from around that time was at pre-K. I was exploring the grounds of our school one day and came across this flat plant thing with all of these needles on it. I did not know the needles were sharp...ta-da! My first cactus, and a porcupine hand!

 

I was 2. My oldest sister was 12. A scary old TV program called "The Outer Limits" was on, and the episode involved a space monster that came through your television into your home. It was too much for my brain to handle, and I went running for my life towards the kitchen. My sister was coming out of the kitchen at the same time, and we had one of those kitchen doors that swings both ways. We hit the door at the same time, and I got the worst end of it. Although I was running forward, the back of my head was the first thing to hit the ground, which is never a good sign. My head split open like a watermelon, and my father scooped me up and loaded me into the car. He drove me across town to where our family doctor lived, and he stitched up my head in his living room with me sitting and screaming in his lounge chair. I remember every terrifying second of the entire ordeal.

Also, although I'm redheaded, the hair that grows out of that scar is brown. I have a little patch of brown hair right in the middle of the back of my head.

 

That's how I sometimes recall memories and the time frames, using the ages of my siblings.

It's pretty interesting how our earliest memories are like dreams. Some really blend together and are hard to divide from reality and dream-state. Do I remember certain things because I was told this at some point and I built the vision to the words?

 

I remember putting together my first sentence. We were sitting around the table, I was about 3 and was in a high chair next to my dad. My brother, aged about 10 and a frightfull bully, spat in the dinner of my 8yr old sister. Mother saw him do it, it was a common occurrance, and when my sister wailed 'He has spat on my food', mother and brother said 'No he didnt!', and I knew I had to make a sentence and be understood, and said quietly to my dad @He did, I saw him@, and dad asked me what did I say. and I said again 'he did, he did spit on her dinner, I saw him'. I offered to share my piece of meat and two small potatoes with my sister, pushed the plate between us and said 'share my dinner', because she had none.
I made an enemy that day, and spent the rest of my life paying for it, for speaking out against her chosen princeling (he had glassed me in the face 18 monthe earlier causing very bad scarring).
Thats my first memory, trying to make the important sentence and trying to protect my sister, aged about three.
I miss you Janice, should you ever stumble across these boards. Continually bullied, you always were the best of us.

 

One of the earliest things I can remember just now was at a birthday party. Mum was friends with a family who had children the same ages as my family. It was the boys birthday - I cant remember if it was 2nd or 3rd birthday party but it would have been early May. I can remember that both our mums had babies in their belly! However I cant remember which sibling it would have been as my mum would have been pregnant for both my 2nd and 3rd birthday! I do remember however that the boy whose birthday it was, was still wearing nappies and I wasn't. I can remember bits of the party, like popping the balloons and playing in the stream and getting soaking wet! The clearest bit of my memory starts with the two of us standing on the steps to the caravan (which were paving slabs balanced on concrete blocks) and I pushed him off the side of the steps because he was annoying me. He fell backwards down the gap at the side of the steps where there was a lot of debris, because he was only wearing a nappy he got lots and lots of cuts all over himself and couldn't get out of the hole. I can remember lying about it saying he had fallen despite him saying I had pushed him. I can remember spending a considerable amount of time convincing our parents he had fallen even resorting to crying to get them to believe me. Afterwords outside he refused to play with me and I was gutted. That was the last time I intentionally wounded him.

 

My earliest memory is of the first day of school. I was 6, and my grandmother was walking with me to the school. For years I thought this was normal, and that people who claimed to have memories of being younger than 6 were making them up. Finally I learned that my repression of all memories before that wasn't unusual in people who lose a parent at an early age (my mother died when I was 4).

But from 6 on, I do have an excellent memory

 

I don't know how I remember this (and I might have dreamt it), but I swear that I remember bouncing in my crib as a child and my mother coming and picking me up out of it by my armpits. I don't know how I remember that, and part of me thinks I dreamt it at some point.

Earliest actual memory I have is from when I was 5 or 6, I stubbed my knee on the door to my room, held it up in in pain and jumped around for a second, then sat on the ground and started crying/wailing. I remember thinking then, "why am I crying? I only stubbed my knee."