I think most folks earliest memorys envolve something scary. Am I right? Think back. What where you doing as a toddler?
I remember at about two years old, I stuck a yellow twistie tie (the kind that holds bread bags closed} into an electric outlet.
Now I’m an electritian. What does that have to do with anything? Hmmmmn.
The earliest thing I can remember is running out of the house in my underpants, and then realizing I was outside in nothing but underpants. I must have been about 2-3.
I remember humiliation more than fear.
A house, in the front yard. It’s winter. The house was grey. I know now that itwasin Wilmington NC. I was 2, and it’s very fuzzy.
Yeah, my first memory is a nightmare. I was two or three and still sleeping in a crib. Monsters were coming to get me and I climbed out of the crib to tell my folks about it and they didn’t believe me and stuck me back in the crib. Of course, the monsters got me. Which probably explains why the rest of my life has been so whacked.
For a long time I thought my earliest memory was from when I was 2 or 3, but after a discussion where me and my dad thought back we realized the situation that I described happened just before my first birthday. I remembered being locked in a car, yes, my dad locked me in a car in the dead of winter in Northern NY. I remember a cop knocking on the window and waving at me while I was sitting in the front seat. Later on someone came and got me out before it got too cold.
My first memory is just of fuzzy static like snow on a TV and then coming out of it and looking at the carpet at my day care and thinking, “It’s blue. My favorite color is blue.” Nothing scary, pretty mundane actually. When I was little I thought the “static” was from the time before I started to remember things. Now, however, I seriously doubt that part was a true memory. I probably dreamed it later.
My first memory is from when I went to the emergency when I was really young. I had fallen and busted my head open. I remember being strapped down to a stretcher and seeing the lights go past over head as I was wheeled down the hallway. Scary, huh?
Well, the best I’ve been able to confirm with my dad, one of these is my first memory. Both took place when I was between 2 and 2 1/2; no one remembers which event took place first, though.
a. My dad and I go to see my uncle Raymond, who I met only that time, off at the bus station. It’s night time. I watch him get on the bus, and wave as it drives off. He’s tall and thin, but I can’t remember anything else about him. It seems that Uncle Raymond was evading the police because of bigamy charges. No one has heard from him in 22 years.
b. My dad carries me along a path, because I’m little, it’s dark out, and I’m not supposed to get my shoes dirty. We’ve visiting Mommy at “the hospital” but it doesn’t look like a hospital, it’s more like Tudor-style buildings (not that I knew what those were then). We visit with mom in the lounge, which has a ping-pong table and a jesus statue in it. I’m mad and confused because mom can’t come home, and Daddy has to work so I’m going back to spend more time at my grandparents house. When we get to the house I ignore Daddy and play with my UFO toy- it spins and has colored lights.
My first memory is a happy one, not a scary one. I was almost three, and my brother had just been born. My mom was in the hospital overnight, and I was crying because I wanted her to come home; she’d never been away overnight that I could remember.
My dad called her room and he was holding me so I could talk to her on the phone (our phone was wall mounted at the time), and was showing me pictures of my mom while I talked to her.
I think the first thing I can remember is Petula Clark singing “Downtown” on the car radio. I was probably 2 or 3. I don’t know how I know that’s the first thing I remember, but I am sure it is.
Some of these are kind of…, uh, sweet. I like yours, Rasa.
I have a couple of snapshots, one of the grandfather clock whose pendulum I liked to watch, and another of the view from my crib up at the tree over my bedroom window at the next house. But my earliest real memory of an event is not really scary or anything.
At the point in my life that this memory is from, I couldn’t talk yet, but I could understand. I crawled over the edge and down the side of my crib. I couldn’t walk yet, so I crawled out into the hall and down the back staircase and made it out into the garage when I heard my aunt, who was watching me, screaming and crying, “Where’s the baby!” I turned around toward the noise and she intercepted me at the base of the stairs.
I have had the incident verified in later life. I would guess it was sometime between 10 and 18 months. I remember much from 2 years of age and forward.
I was no older than three.
I fell off the bunkbed onto my brother’s Pinball Alley" and had to have stitches. I’m sure it was quite traumatic, but what I really recall is the doctor giving me a glove he had blown up like a balloon and my big brother pushing me up and down the halls of the hospital in a wheelchair. And it seems like everything was green.
It’s not a bad memory at all.
My earliest memory is on my third or fourth birthday. My mother came in my room and woke me up and I remember the excitement… and then a friend of my mothers came in my room, stuffed me inside of a sleeping bag and carried me like that to my grandparents’s house… where I opened the top of the sleeping bag to see balloons and family… and then shortly after I tripped trying to get out of the sleeping bag and hit my head on something… and from that point it begins to get very fuzzy
I was about two years old toddling along with my parents when we saw a swan. Looked perfectly soft and cuddly to me and so I wanted to pet it. Getting encouragement from my parents I proceeded to toddle up to the swan. HIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSS!!! I screamed at toddled at top speed back to my parents who were laughing their asses off. I don’t recall if they had to change my pants or not.
I remember going to a drive up window at a store, and my mother getting a Dr. Pepper. I was about 3 years old.
One of the earliest clear memories I have is of getting my thumb stuck in a tin can. I was three.
I was apparently rooting around in the garbage pail in the kitchen and just couldn’t resist the tasty food-coated tin can sitting tantalizingly on top of the mess. I remember getting my thumb stuck between the sharp lid and the side of the can. It was really wedged in there, and the more I tried to extricate it, the deeper the metal cut into me.
I struggled for awhile in silence, because I knew I was going to be in Big Trouble for getting my thumb stuck in a tin can.
I was eventually discovered, surely because I had gone into the kitchen, not come out right away, and was being “too quiet”.
I did get in Big Trouble, too. And I still have a faint scar on my thumb.
Very mundane. A stone wall and a clothesline. It was the back yard of the house we lived in in Kialua, Hawaii. I returned to that house a year and a half ago. The wall is still there, but the clothesline is gone.
I was three. My dad backed over me with his car.
It didn’t feel real good.
I was probably around two years old. I remember being jealous of my sisters crib becuase it was higher up then mine.
I have a few distinct memories from the first house I lived in, which we moved out of when I was almost four years old. One is a more general thing that’s less of an event than just something that happened; I remember walking downstairs into the basement of our old house and looking to my left, where my father was ensconced in a chair that I later described as “booger-yellow,” hooking a rug. That was Dad’s hobby until I was 5 or 6; I think we only have two of those rugs still around. Mom is stunned that I remember this. 
I remember when my brother was born, though this is somewhat blurrier than the above. I was three years old. I remember being in the hospital with its bright white hallways. I very vaguely remember being given my newborn brother to hold for a picture (which my parents still display proudly and is absolutely adorable). My strongest memory of that day, though, is of being given a Strawberry Shortcake doll – the consolation prize that many firstborns are given upon the birth of a sibling. I loved that doll.
After my brother’s birth and before we moved, I remember going into his room – it was at the top of the stairs in the first room to the right – and climbing onto his crib. I’d brace my feet on the bottom and hold on to the wooden bars and kind of swing back and forth, staring at the baby. In hindsight I’m stunned that the crib didn’t fall over and spill both me and my brother to the floor.
Apologies for how many memories I’ve thrown in here, but I honestly don’t know which is the earliest. Obviously #2 is earlier than #3, but #1 could be anywhere around there.