I don’t have many before the age of 5… I find it interesting that most people cannot remember ANYTHING from their first couple years.
Here are a few of my fleeting memories:
age 4: fleeting memories of my mom pregnant with my sister, and going to the hospital. I wanted to go, but was told I must stay home with grandparents.
age 3-4: clinging to mom’s leg when i was scared about something or another.
age 4ish: being trasnfixed with “the courtship of eddie’s father”. an early-70s tv show.
Vivid memories for me didn’t come until around age 5-6, the kindergarten/1st grade years. People have told me they remember all sorts of things from pre-age 3, but i’m not sure I buy it. Or maybe i’ve just done too many drugs in the intervening years… But I’ll toss it out to you…
What is your earliest memory?
Also, my most humorous early childhood memories… around age 5 my sister had a giant (to me anyway) raggedy ann doll… i found it horrifying and was sure it would come to life and attack me. I think i ran from her room screaming a few times. Around the same time I remember asking my mom why my sister didn’t have a penis. Oh, one more. I was at the neighbor’s house, around age 4-5, and they had a toilet seat cover with a picture of santa’s face on it. i remember peeing on santa’s face, because i thought santa was thirsty. The dad of my toddler friends got really upset at that. I think i remember this because of his rage.
My early childhood memories seem to be penis-centric. I guess nothing has changed.
Hmmm lets see, i may not be able to put them all in chronological order, but i have tons of pre-kindergarten memories.
I remember feeling my little sister kick inside my mom, (age 3)
I remember naming my sister. (i was 3, i named her Tria)
I remember being too young to form complete sentences. I would get frustrated as hell because i would want to say something and i wouldnt know the words.
I remember my dad asking me to bring him a pen once. I brought him a pencil. He sent me back and told me that he wanted a PEN. Well, i didnt know what the difference between a pen and a pencil was, i just somehow knew that they were both things you used to write. This is an example of me not knowing enough words to ask him what the difference between a pen and a pencil was. Dad got pissed. I think i was 2.
I’ve been told it’s more than likely a false memory, but I can vaguely remember my mother bathing me in our kitchen sink. It was one of those older style porcelain sinks that’s deeper than the ones made today, but I still would have had to have been very small and very young.
Seems like an odd memory to make up, and my mom has confirmed that she did bathe me like that as a baby/early toddler.
Then, like you, I don’t remember much until kindergarten. One fleeting memory at age four, the year before school, then I remember more and more as you progress up the elementary school grades.
Could it be that school helps teach us memory? Or that opening the floodgates of interaction with other people kicks it in?
When I was born, my parents lived in a small house on my paternal grandparents’ property. I have a very vague memory of a bright summer day, while visitors were present. I would have been no more tham eighteen months old at that stage, because we shifted to a brand new house before my second birthday (so my mother tells me).
I have lots of pre-5 memories. I can recall my sister in a crib in my room. I was still sleeping in, if not a crib, at least some kind of bed with rails. I distinctly remember that. Since she is not quite 2 years younger, that would put me at about 3-ish.
I can remember watching Underdog cartoons, and several other memories of a house where we lived only when I was 3-4.
It’s moving day–we’re crossing the Ohio river to live in a house in my state of birth, West Virginia. While the hub-bub goes on in the house, I’m amusing myself outside. I’m sitting on the porch and see a red balloon that has managed to get loose from its owner floating by in the sky. I remember thinking, I want that balloon. I want it to float down to me. I want it to want to be with me, to “choose” me. (Needless to say, it didn’t happen.)
I was two.
Interesting to see how the mind of a 2yro works, eh?
FWIW, here’s mine: a hazy memory of scribbling with crayons on a piece of printer paper (the old super-wide kind with the green and white bars) on my parents’ dining room table. I saw a photograph of me doing it years later, and asked my parents about it…apparently my father once got a bunch of extra from work, so for a few weeks they’d tape it down to the table and let me go nuts.
By the date on the back of the photo, this would’ve been when I was 17-18 months old.
I have a couple from right around my 3rd birthday. We had a station wagon. It was an incredibly hot summer. The rear window just shattered by itself. Another is of my third birthday party and grabbing handfuls of cake.
I remember being in a car at night, and waiting outside a filling station (that’s what they were called in those days)
with “The Sign of the Flying Red Horse.”
I remember an unfamiliar place I slept during that trip because of being laid on a bed with a bright orange bedspread.
And I, too, remember being bathed in a sink, with another child, around that same time.
When I questioned my mother about these memories a few years before she died, she told me she believed those memories were from the trip our family took to Nebraska so she could visit her parents and be comforted, about five or six months after my twin sister died at the age of almost six months. She believed I was under a year old. The bedspreads were at the motel room where we stopped on the way. The sink was in my grandmother’s kitchen, and the other child was probably one of my cousins.
I also remember receiving twin dolls, a boy and a girl, for my third birthday.
It seems to me that memories of very young children are sometimes etched there because there was a break in routine, something out of the ordinary. I also notice that one other poster with very young memories also remembers bright color. Does anyone else have those bright colors in their memories?
I remember being in an apartment with my mother and my father. My father was in the bathtub, and I remember walking into the bathroom and showing him the Slinky I was playing with.
That’s the only memory I have of my 'rents living together, and they divorced before I was four. I think I was three-ish when the Slinky thing happened.
According to a child development class, humans have what they call 3 year amnesia, meaning it is VERY rare for anyone to remember anything that happened before they were three. In my class of about 70 only 4 had memories, and they were all of very traumatic things, hospitalizations and the like. Also, most children under the age of three don’t really have a grasp of age, so if you remember that you were 2, you probably weren’t.
That said, my father swears he remembers sitting on his mothers lap in a specific car, in the snow. An event that my Grandmother says happened when he was less than a year old. Go figure.