My grandfather said he remembered falling in a well at 6 months of age. He passed away at the age of 74 or thereabouts, so this is a memory that goes back about 3/4 of a century! Impressive! I was tempted to call BS on it (my grandfather could be a bit of a trickster if he was in the mood), but he seemed serious at the time, and I realize a traumatic memory like that might stay with you forever. (I noticed a lot of Doper memories from very early on seem to be of the traumatic type, so I may have some credence here.)
What's your earliest childhood memory? Is it possible my niece has one from when she was in diapers?
I remember going down the stairs in my sister’s dressing gown calling to people to wake up because it was my birthday. Describing the house to my mother, she confirms it was my second birthday. I also remember going to college with my father to check if he had any messages. I remember the room with the pigeonholes and the smell of the polish they’d used on the wood. He did that course from just before I was two (late September birthday) until the following summer, but I can’t place it within that time. I think Nicole’s telling the truth.
We have long memories in my family. My brother remembers things that happened before and just as he was learning to walk; I have memories from when I was still in a crib, so before 1½; my son remembers things from when he was 9 months old (he’s 30 now). Actually, this son remembers pretty nearly everything.
None of the above specifically remembers being in diapers, but my brother and I both remember being toilet trained, and they did it young when we were kids.
My earliest memory is of a little green plastic potty in our living room. So that would’ve been about 2 yrs old. The earliest major world even I remember when I was 4 yrs; sitting in front of the TV watching some stone wall being torn down and all the adults in the room were completlely estatic. 
Around the same time my great-grandmother died. At her funeral my mother took me up to the casket to “say goodbye”. She made me kiss great-grandma on forehead :eek::eek::eek:. I still remember how cold she felt. So very cold and dead. That’s my strongest memory of great-grandma and to this day my mother alternates between denying she ever did that and tell me it was a perfectly normal thing to do and changing the subject.
When I was a child the family only moved once, when I was 5 years old, from a company owned sawmill town into a house of our own a few miles away. The new house had been empty for some time and I remember the yard as it looked before it was cleared/mowed.
But I also remember the old sawmill town, called Bradwood. I remember watching bullfrog tadpoles that still had the tail and rear legs, that were living under the wood side walks. I remember that my little sister fell off the rack used for greasing cars, and we all got in trouble for taking her there. We took bottles back to the store and traded for wax candy filled with sugar water. I made sure that the neighbors never found a ripe strawberry.
And many more things that must have happened when I was 2 to 5 years old. I do not remember being a baby or diaper training or anything like that. But I would not say it is impossible.
My earliest memory is of falling off a chair and cracking my head on the kitchen counter. I was being babysat but my mom took me to the doctor’s to get stitches. I think I could speak by then because I think I asked the babysitter (who was sitting at the dining table while I was on the kitchen chair) what she was doing. I also seem to remember the doctor or nurse or maybe my mom tell me I was a good girl for not fussing at all when they stitched me up. I asked my mom about it a few weeks ago, and she said I would have been around 18 months.
Wow, an incestuous Google ad. I guess incest is certainly memorable!
Anyway, my earliest memory is of me sitting on a brightly colored couch with flower prints, a bottle in hand, watching Woody Woodpecker.
Apparently up until 18 months(when we moved from that apartment and rid ourselves of that awful couch) I would spend weekday mornings on the couch, not wanting to be touched, spoken to, or disturbed in any way while I watched my “news” and had my “coffee.”
So before 18 months of age.
My earliest memory is from when we moved from Ohio to West Virginia…I was somewhere around 2 1/2 - 3 (I don’t know exactly when we moved, but I know we were in WV for at least a year, and we moved out of WV when I was 4). Actually, this may not be from moving day; it may be earlier: I remember sitting on the front steps of the Ohio house and looking up in the sky and seeing a red balloon that had escaped its owner float by high in the air. I remember I wanted that balloon, and I wanted it to float to me…I could visualize it floating to me, so I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t. This memory has helped me understand how a toddler/preschooler interprets “reality;” I was still thinking if I could imagine it, it meant it was possible.
I remember the day we moved, too. I remember the old Ohio house being emptied, and sitting in the master bedroom while Mom grabbed last-minute things. I remember the rooster to my Fisher Price Little People barn that had long disappeared being uncovered once my parents’ bed was moved out. I can still see that rooster lying on its side in the big empty space where the bed had been.
We were in my aunt’s living room. My father lifted me up to see my cousin “sleeping”. She was in a long pale yellow dress and looked like a princess.
She was 14 and had drowned in a pond while ice skating and she was in a casket. My aunt and uncle lived in a small town and in those days people were still sometimes laid out for the wake in their homes. I was 2 1/2.
I have several very early memories. I think my earliest was when I was crawling, so I would have been older than nine months, younger than eighteen months. We were in a hotel. I crawled out the room and stopped at the room service tray on the floor and started eating something on the plate.
A second memory happened at home. We had a playroom in the basement. My older brother had left a bucket of legos at the top of the stairs, and I toddled up to them and tipped them over, spilling them down the stairs. I specifically remember my mom telling him that I hadn’t meant to spill his toys, but that babies sometimes do things like that.
The third memory is of lying on a very small, flat bed with a railing and looking up at a lamp sconce on the wall which had red glass in an iron bracket. My half-brother was visiting us. It was on my father’s sailboat, which he sold before my younger brother was born, so I couldn’t have been more than two years old.
I asked my dad about who was the old man on the sofa, while I was on the floor looking up at him. He said it was his father who died when I was a year old.
My earliest memory was when I was 3, and my mom was driving me to preschool. We arrived there and the building was on fire.
I’m sure it isn’t a coincidence that I’ve always been nervous around ANY type of fire, including candles, and can NOT and will NOT use matches.
There was a botanical garden across the street from our apartment building. To get from the sidewalk to the greenhouse you took a narrow stone path that was over a pool of large goldfish. I remember sitting in a wicker stroller and being pushed along that path, and being able to see goldfish on both sides. At one point I turned around and saw my mother pushing the stroller. She was wearing a black head scarf that had red roses on it.
We moved from that apartment when I was one year old, and never returned. Both my mother and aunt confirmed all the details of this memory. A few years ago, after my mother passed away, I found that head scarf among her belongings. I don’t remember her ever wearing it, except for that one memory.
I have memories that may be pieced together from stories and photographs, but this memory may be my earliest memory that has no photo or family story attatched.
It is also one of my most unremarkable OPs ever, I guess.
I asked my neighbor, who is a psychiatrist, when my son (age two then) would start to remember things in adulthood. He said that memory is tied to language, and that a rule of thumb would be when your child can tell a story about what happened, then he is remembering things. He (The Boy) told pretty good stories at the time, with the caveat that you’d have had to been there at the time to know exactly what he means (“eat a rainbow every day” means eat foods of different colors for maximum health benefits…Mom gets this, but the guy whose dog we found wandering in the street and returned probably thinks he wasn’t telling much of a story)
The earliest memory that I can put a date on was one of the most important days of the 20th Century: V-J Day. I asked my mother and aunt (who were setting off firecrackers) what was going on. They said that the war was over. I thought to myself that the war must be like a party. I’m glad to know that party was in my vocabulary by age two and war was not.
I think there are other memories that go back farther – tactile memories like the feel of the slats in my baby bed. I’m 66. Those memories are much clearer to me than memories of what I did on Halloween.
You’re almost my mother’s age, but that first paragraph made me want to grab li’l you and give her the hug to end all hugs 
My earliest datable memories is from when I was 25mo, by Mom’s reckoning. We had moved the previous fall, from a flat in the center of Pamplona to one in a very tall tower outside of town; there were very few buildings around. I remember standing on tiptoes on my table, so I could look out the window as it was sunny for the first time in a long time, and the big prairie below wasn’t all-green, like it had been just the day before, it was almost white (I’ve seen those same tiny pink-tipped daisies in San Francisco). That must have been around April. The next datable memories are from half-a-year to a year later.
I was about two. I remember a lot of things from my early childhood but there is one memory I can date. My brother had switched some turtles for a kitten, and I remember how my mom had emptied a small baby bottle sold with candies in it and filled it with milk to nurse the kitten. So from then I just had to substract our cat’s age to my own. My mom doesn’t remember it though.
I don’t remember anything before about 5. This is most likely because I changed countries around age 5, and the trauma (not really bad but trauma nonetheless) probably made me forget a lot.
Sadie loves ours too, chases herself madly around six or seven times and then flops.
I remember several events from when we lived in St. Petersburg – falling down a long flight of stairs, a friend burying one of my toys, playing on the beach, and falling off a rubber raft. I wasn’t quite three when we were there.