I remember my third birthday – cake being served and my family singing to me. I distinctly remember I had a yellow sippy-cup, the open-top kind with a built-in straw. At some point on my birthday, my father wrote my name and the number 3 on the cup in magic marker. My sister had a red cup with her name and age, too.
I definitely became cognizant when I turned 3. I may have memories before then, but they’re so vague that they could be made-up. Like, I sorta-kinda remember taking a bath in the sink (which would have happened before the age of 3) but I’m not sure if I’m not confusing memory of the event with memory of the photographs.
I remember watching a shampoo commercial with a woman washing that man right out of her hair. I was really young because my family was still in the old house.
I remember being three years old, in nursery school. There was some kind of assembly at the school and we listened to a man sing that song “Too Hot”. You know it. It goes “Too hot, too hot, too hot, ba-byyyy.”
At the same place, I remember watching diarhea run down this toddler’s leg.
I remember playing with my feces with you with the face (she was playing with hers too). This may have happened before we turned 3 (or maybe I just hope it did since three is kinda old to be doing that kind of thing!)
I remember riding in a stroller at a park, transfixed by the Mylar balloon floating up above. I have flashbacks of this memory every time I hear “Let a Fool Believe” by Michael McDonald.
I remember my mother taking my temperature rectally (she doesn’t believe me). I consider it a completely nuetral experience.
monstro
Err…did you clear this with you with the face before sharing it with all of the internet?
My first memory is of being carried toward the door of the first house I lived in. It was a pretty ugly house, so I suppose it was a BIT traumatic… after that, my next memory is of the time I had a dream about a giant, growling spider during a thunderstorm and really freaked out.
My boyfriend says that his first memory is actually of being born - which I was extremely skeptical about at first, but his mother’s apparently confirmed the details, things like room color, where people-shaped blobs were, etc. Most of what he remembers is just that it was very cold and very bright, and that he wanted to go back in the warm dark place RIGHT AWAY. It was a fairly traumatic birth for him, (well, for his mom, too…) with his jaw being wrenched around by the forceps, so I guess that would fit with the pattern. If it’s a false memory, it’s still kinda cool, but if it’s a real one… eh, he’s always been pretty weird like that. 
The earliest memory that I can put a date to was V-J Day. I was almost 25 months old. My mother and aunt were shooting firecrackers. I asked what was going on and my mother said, “The war is over!” Since they seemed so happy and excited, I thought that war must mean “party.”
Salvador Dali said that he could remember being in the womb.
I think that we may have physical memories that pre-date our mental memories. As a middle-aged adult I accidentally stepped into a scalding shower. The water hit only my feet for a split second and I hopped back out unharmed. I knew that I was okay and yet something was bothering me about it. I sat down and pulled my knees up under my chin (or at least tried to). I called to my husband and explained what had happened and added, “I think this has happened before.” My mother confirmed that once she forgot to test the water in the tub and began to lower me into it. She said that I screamed and drew up my legs. She said that I was just a “babe-in-arms” when it happened. My body remembered even though my mind did not.
My earliest memory is from before I was 2. I remember looking up at the carving on Stone Mountain GA. I can also remember my 2nd birthday cake. It had animal crackers on it.
My wife wonders why I can remember things like that but can’t remember to close the cupboard doors.
My memories from when we belonged to a beach club and I was little kind of blend together, but one very specific memory is from when I was 3 and first needed stitches. I was walking behind a swing set that was animal shapes, and I walked too close behind and got conked above the right eye. The rest of that memory is a lot of people rushing to me and me crying.
Next earliest memories are from nursery school. Well now that I think of it, I was 3 then, too. I brought strawberry frosted cupcakes for my birthday, and it made another kid throw up. The place was called Alphabetland and so on the big wall was the alphabet, stretching from one side to the other. Only other thing I remember about nursery school was that we did some sort of presentation for our parents and we each wore a big smock made of brown paper, and mine had a drum painted on it.
It was a birthday… or something. Mine? I think it was my 3rd? Or 4th? The memory is vague. I have no idea why I responded to this thread, as I’m having quite a hard time answering this question. There was definitely a birthday though. I remember being at a table with crappy yellow place mats and a cake.
My earliest memory was from when I was not quite two years old. I walked downstairs to see what Daddy was doing. I asked him, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m baking a cake.” I said, “No, you’re not. You’re painting.” And he was. Painting my toybox. It still exists. It’s white, and there’s a picture of a bi-plane on it. No trauma there.
My earliest verifiable memory is from right around my 2nd birthday. My grandparents had given me a present, a toy suitcase with a picture of a lamb on the lid. I put a packet of Doublemint gum inside it, and my mom put it up on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
Fairly innocuous, but it’s the one early memory I can pin a date on. My little sister was about to be born, and my grandparents had come to be with my mom; however, the baby was late and they had to go away again before she arrived. My sister’s birthday is about 3 weeks after mine, so the memory can’t be more than a week or two after my own birthday. And I can’t be remembering a later birthday, since my grandfather died that summer and this was the last time my family saw him.
I have other early memories: of playing on an ugly green flower-print carpet; of standing in front of an open oven door while my mom and one of my aunts were talking on either side (I think this was a Thanksgiving); of my brother running up to a man in a white t-shirt (probably my father, but could be one of my uncles) who had just come in the front door at my grandmother’s house–but these are all so vague that I couldn’t say if I was less than 2 at the time, or 3 or 4.
I have three, but I’m not sure what order they came in; they would have all happened around the same time, since they took place in the little house we lived in in Cherry Hill, NJ, and we moved from there when I was 2-ish. One was a party: I remember looking wwaaaaay up at the table at a really cool multi-layer cake in different colors. Mom says that was when my little sister was born. Another one was going to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the first movie I ever saw. We came in after the lights had gone down, and when the lights came up again, I was shocked to see all the other people in the theater.
The third one involved me wandering out the back door of our house on a blindingly sunny day, wearing only a diaper. I walked across the yard to our neighbor’s house and spent awhile playing there, before her mom asked if my mom knew where I was. Ahhh, those innocent times where a 2-year-old could walk around by herself without anyone panicking.
I trot this story out all the time to my friends.
My first really clear memory–one that I can actually remember specific details–was coming up with the grand idea that I could drive the house around town if I just stuck a key in an electrical outlet. It was a good idea in theory; but I failed to devise a means of steering. Oh, and that whole ‘electrical shock’ thing. I’m still, to this day, afraid of electricity.
I have much fuzzier memories from before that, but this is the first really clear one; i.e., I can remember sticking the key in and jumping back when the outlet started making funny noises and smoking. I remember that the key was charred afterwards, too.
I have two very early memories, and I’m not sure which one came first.
In one, I had just thrown up in my crib and was lying on my stomach looking at my vomit (although I don’t remember actually throwing up). It looked like noodles and beef, and I looked at the vomit and distinctly thought the word, “Noodles”. My mom remembers this too, and she said when she came in the next morning the smell hit her like a wave, but I was curled up in a corner of my crib, sleeping peacefully. I was probably about a year old at the time.
In the other memory, I was being rocked by my mom in the middle of the night in our living room. I was lying horizontally in her arms, and I remember seeing the left side of her face, the chair, and the furniture in the room in the shadows. She was singing “Doe a Deer” to me, and she sang the words too fast, so I remember thinking, “What’s a ‘dropagoldensun’…?” Again, I was probably a year old or even a little younger.
My mom can’t believe that I remember things from when I was that young - she told me her earliest memory is from when she was around five.
I remember lying in a chromed hospital crib. There was an purple light nearby so the white sheets were sort of glowing oddly and they didn’t smell like the sheets at home did. That’s my earliest memory.
What I don’t directly remember but have been told was that when I was just 2 years old, I had the standard (for the 50’s) Tonsel and Adnoid removal. I think the memory and this little factoid coincide.
I also remember Eddie Lampert and I griping to each other that Jimmy Santella thought he was the boss just because he was 4.
This is a great thread! I have two early memories from roughly the age of 3.
I distinctly remember sitting on the back of a bearskin rug in my grandmother’s living room and feeling the tongue in the bear’s mouth. I remember thinking that it was dry and stiff and wondering if all bears’ tongues felt that way.
My second memory is not nearly as clear. I remember standing up on a couch in the living room of a very big, old house, eating a lollipop and looking out the window behind the couch. I was with another girl about my age and we were rubbing the stickiness from the candy onto the back of the couch.
I also swear that I can remember lying on the changing table watching dustmotes flying around in a beam of sunshine coming in the window above me, but my mom claims there is no way possible I can remember it since I was about 1 at the time. She thinks I am simply “remembering” by looking at a photo of myself lying on the changing table.
I often wonder how many of these early memories are genuine early memories or if instead they are fabricated from stories told to us by our parents. Personally, I think much of it is simply relating stories we’ve been told.
Great topic. I have memories that go back tothe age of three and I know that because we moved from the town of Orangeville, Ontario when I was three and I remember the apartment that we lived in at the time. My earliest memory is leaning against my little brother’s crib in the nude and fondling my erection until my mother told me to stop it.
I remember laying on my back while my mother played the piggy game with me. You know, the one where she starts with your big toe and says, “this little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef, and this little piggy had none” before getting to your last toe, when she’d say, “and this little piggy cried wee-wee-wee all the way home!” while wiggling the pinky toe.
God I loved the piggy game.
Another early memory, which may or may not have preceded the above, was of me sitting on the kitchen floor, drinking from my Mickey Mouse sippy cup. I couldn’t walk and was still in diapers so I was, what, maybe one?
I remember my daddy taking me fishing – I was a toddler, just walking. He’d let me run around naked on the boat and play with his squishy plastic lures and when I got hot he’d pick me up and dunk me in the water to cool me off. There was this hatch on the boat where he kept fish and I liked opening it to see them splash around.
I don’t remember being born, but I read somewhere that lots of young kids remember it but forget somewhere in childhood. I asked two of my little cousins, both five, and they both said they remembered being tiny infants and that it was no fun. Heh. 
.:Nichol:.
I have a couple, I think they’re both from when I was about 2.
I’m sitting on my mom’s lap and holding one of those toy guns that were made out of shiny silver metal, I threw it at my sister’s head. I’m sure I had a good reason.
The other one (I hope is not related to the first one), I was in the grocery store with my dad, I’m sitting in the cart while he pays, he picks up the bag of groceries and walks out the door. A couple of people run after him, and he comes back and gets me.
I would imagine that interesting or unusual events are more memorable.
For what its worth, my earliest memory was an event that took place in the spring of 1974 in Brooklyn, New York (I was 3 1/2).
We were visiting my grandmother in Trump Village. I walked up towards the wrong building so my parents called me back. As I was turning around, a plastic bag full of water splattered on the ground a few feet in front of me. (I gather that the bag had been thrown as a joke by a resident of the building).