My family moved from the city to the coast when I was four years and four months old. That was a handy demarcation, because I have thousands of memories from the pre-move time. Anyway, once, some Doper claimed he knew my mind better than I do and that I couldn’t possibly have any memories from <5 years of age. I’ve forgotten that person’s name, but by crikey it made me angry, more than most things on the SDMB. The nerve! Anyway, I can recall getting my nappy (diaper) changed.
First thing I remember is being in my crib and mom coming in to give me some milk from a sippy cup.
Then I remember slipping on the kitchen floor and busting my chin open. (On a chair rung? I’m not sure.) I was wearing these wool slippers paternal grandma knitted for me. Just wool. An accident waiting to happen. Anyway, I thought the pain would recede, as such pains usually did, but when it got worse, that’s when I started howling. I don’t remember the trip to the ER, but my mom sure does. They questioned her pretty throughly, but finally had to accept the story, borne up by the slippers I was still wearing.
Then I remember being in my uncle’s VW bug and having him flash the peace sign to my aunt when they passed on the road. (How totally early-seventies.) And, I swear this is true, seeing Norman Mailer on the TV and knowing who he was. “That’s the guy who wrote the book about the moon!” Well, sort of.
I remember sitting on the counter in my grandmother’s kitchen with my feet in the sink peeling a carrot and talking to her. I can see my red Ked sneakers in the sink and the carrot shavings falling on my feet while we talked. I was born in October of 1962 and she died in March of 1965 so I was less than 2 1/2.
I don’t remember what we were talking about, but it is the only clear memory of her that I have.
My mother confirmed the age for me once, but it was a while ago and I forget how old I might have been. However, it was about the time that I was just able to pull myself to a standing position in my crib. My memory is of crying, then throwing my (not quite yet) favourite blanket out of the crib and onto the floor. It took some effort to do so. Nobody would come. I would cry more. I then remember, very vividly, *sticking my fingers down my throat * and making myself puke. That got my father to run in, looking frantic. Well, his legs looked frantic, since I don’t remember looking up at his face, but he must have been sleeping, because he was all skinny, hairy legs and blue tighty underwear.
I even remember how funny my hand tasted in my mouth; kind of a funny, not too salty taste, and a little bit bitter and oddly dusty, since… well, since lord only knows where my hands had been up until that point. Bleh.
Anyway, I had thought it all to be some weird, random memory of something stupid I did as a kid, but my mother told me much later in my life that as a child, I used to make myself sick to get attention. My pediatrician told her to stop running to me when I did it, and she spent a horrible hour or so standing outside my nursery door while I cried my head off, then made myself sick. She didn’t come running, and apparently I wimpered my fool ass to sleep, and never, ever did it again. (Until I was 15 and bulimic, that is…)
Around the same time period, I can remember weird dreams I used to have. I remember laying in the dark, and seeing my crib bars, and falling asleep. I would then dream of pitch blackness, but then perfectly spherical, colourful balls would bounce around in the blackness. Just one at a time; a red one, a blue one, a green one. They would come in from… hmm. How to describe it. They’d come in from the northeast blackness of my dreams, and bounce out of the southwest of my dreams. Heh. Diagonal-like. They always bounced slow… not quite Baywatch slow, a little faster than that. Sometimes there would be two or three at a time, but most often it was just one at a time. Bouncing lazily in and out of pitch blackness. It wasn’t scary, but kind of relaxing.
Weird.
AS I said, I have a handy demarcation point of four years, four months of age.
To the “no memories before you’re five” naaysayers, I just give a detailed description of my house’s floorplan, and the streetscape of my suburb at the time (all confirmed by adults), and kindly invite them to bite me. 
The earliest memory I can date is from the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962 I was 3 years old. I had just been given a new pup tent and couldn’t wait to camp out in the back yard in it. My memory is of standing outside the door of the house asking my mother if I could sleep in the tent. She said no, come inside. At the time, everybody was worried about nuclear war, which is why she wouldn’t let me stay out, but I knew nothing about it at the time except that grownups were acting strangely uneasy.
My real earliest memory from my infancy is that my parents used to bathe me in the sink when I was a little baby. When I grew a little bigger they started bathing me in the bathtub. I preferred the sink, and tried to tell them so, but had no language. I remember how frustrating it was wanting to tell them something but being unable to form the words. I must have been 1 year old because language acquisition happens by the age of 2.
Five? That is much too late a cutoff point for memory, get real! I have lots of clear, definite memories from the age of 4, starting with my birthday. My grandparents came over for my birthday, I remember walking up to my grandfather and saying “I like you.”
I opened this thread to post about October 1962, and found a 1962 car in the OP, and then there’s Kolak of Twilo who was born then. Pretty neat.
My first memory is about waking up from a nightmare.
I awoke, and I was in my crib, the one with the blue bars. I had dreamed about a terrifying lightbulb with an evil buzz mounted on the end of the crib. As I lay there recovering from the dream, I could still vividly imagine it there on the end of the crib, with cartoony lines in it where the filament was: two red ones sticking out from the base, and a jagged orange one across them.
This was before I moved into the big bed sometime before I turned four, so I must have been three or younger. I have a lot of memories that I know are from age four, but not so many from before.
I also used to dream of “the clutches”, two gripping hands that would come down from the top left and top right corners of the scene to menace me. I would frequently draw these.
It wasn’t before I saw an incubator a few years ago that suddenly these memories had a context, for in the incubator was the light bulb at the end and the gripping gloves that came in from the side. I was born three months premature and spent those months in an incubator.
I remember my Grandma’ giving me a bath in the kitchen sink. I also remember crying like the dickens because I wanted to know why “Broom Hilda” insisted on taking my clothes off and sticking me in a pool of water.
I also remember my Mom explaining to me that the purpose of salt is NOT to cool the food off on your plate but rather to give it flavor. (She had to do this after observing me salt my plate copiously and wondering how come the damn thing isn’t cooling off.)
I was sitting with a little girl my own age, playing with toys, in the middle of the street! :eek: :smack:
I had slipped away from Mom, who was changing my baby brother’s diaper.
My Dad found me, grabbed me by one arm, & paddled my fanny all the way home!
I’m looking out the window at my mother leaving for work in her car, and I’m crying because I don’t want her to leave. Between me and the window is the back of a person with huge frizzy hair.
I told my parents about this memory once, and they identified the frizzy-haired person as the nanny I had in the house which we moved away from before I turned two. So I’m pretty sure that’s my first memory.
I’ve told one here before, about eating a lady bug from the screen door. (I don’t recommend it), but recently I remembered something else that, I think, happened earlier.
My grandparents had a '47 Ford. It was black and looked like a huge turtle.
I think, this may have happened the day my grandfather brought the car home, because everyone was climbing in and out of it. I got into the back seat, and closed the door. Somehow, no one noticed. At first I thought I was very clever, hiding from everyone. But when I got bored waiting for someone to find me, I realized I wasn’t strong enough to open the door. I stood on the back seat, barely tall enough to see out the window, crying, not so much, from being scared of not being able to get out, but being afraid I wouldn’t ever be allowed to ride in the car, since I couldn’t get myself out. (Hey, I was a baby!) I would have been less than 2.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff floating around in my head from between the ages of two and three, but I’m not sure which one is first. I’m guessing it was the one where I was in sitting a car seat in the family’s '53 Ford, at the very top of the steep hill we lived on, with my mother getting out to move a large rock out of the then-unpaved road.
Most, unfortunately, seem to be relatively traumatic events: waking up from a nightmare in which I was trying to go down a stairway while ghosts were coming out of the walls and trying to grab me; staring up at a huge, bright operating-theatre light while a team of doctors stick a tube down my throat to pump out my stomach, after I supposedly had swallowed most of a bottle of aspirin (it later turned out that I had probably just scattered them around); in the hospital again due to a bout of bronchitis; picking up a pair of pliers and cutting through the cord to my father’s American Flyer train set at Christmas, er, while it was plugged in.
What can I say, no wonder I was a nervous wreck during most of my childhood.
I’m getting injections from syringes and it hurts so I’m crying, and the room is very bright. There’s a someone in a white coat in front of me doing the stabbing. Someone is holding me from behind, I think it’s my mom. Everything is blurry, I guess because my eyes don’t work very well yet.
I remember very dimly there being a time when I was the only child, but my first clear memory is of sitting down against the livingroom wall with my legs straight out in front of me so I had enough lap to fit my newborn sister in. She was veryveryred and wrinkly, but she looked right at me. I was two months short of my 3rd birthday.
I was three or so. I wanted to watch a firework but my parents didn’t want me to. So I watched it from a distance, from behind a window, and was pissed off.
My parents have confirmed this, and there are no pictures in the family albums that I might be mistaking for the actual memories.
I had a premature sister born when I was 2, who died about 3 days later, and I remember a lot of people being in the house, and being given a blanket. I even remember what I was wearing that day.
The people in the house were the visitors after the fuenreal, and the blanket was one my grandparents had bought in anticipation of the new baby.
A lot of times people who believe you can’t remember things from before the age of 5 or so scoff and say that we’ve probably been told stories, and we imagine the memories. Well, I’m not sure which of these things occured first, but my parents cringed when I asked them when they occured. Both happened shortly after I turned two.
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My Dad’s half brother fled to Canada by bus because there was a warrant out on him for being a bigamist. I remember watching him get on the bus and waving good-bye. (He’s never been heard from since, ftr.)
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I was taken to visit a relative who was spending time in a mental hospital. The buildings were brick and there was a bust of Jesus hanging over the ping-pong table in the rec room.
My brother, 17 months younger than me in a highchair wearing a Diaper, my Mom made Gingerbreadmen, gave me one, in an Apartment we left when I was 4 and 6 mos … My WAG I was early 4 but could have been 3
I remember being allowed to sit on the passenger seat of the rented moving truck that my dad was about to drive away and wanting to ride with him and not in the car with mom, sis, and cat. It was about a month after I turned 2.
More clear memories, including who was there and what was said don’t really start for me until I was about 4. There are a few fleeting memories from my third year, such as helping build a snow dog, and getting a booster shot that made my arm sore.
Wow, who says that?
At some point when I was two, I cracked my head on a table in our pediatric dentist’s waiting room and ended up needing stitches (I still have a faint scar there, 22 years later). I clearly remember my dad pulling them out once the cut healed, even the sensation of having them pulled from my skin and how unusual it felt.
I also remember when my dad came home from the hospital after my younger sister was born, and him taking me and my other sisters there to visit her and my mom. That was about two weeks before my third birthday.
I want to say that the thing with the stitches happened first, but I’m not sure. We have a family picture taken before she was born when I still had the stitches, but I don’t know how far along my mom was at that point.