I was three, I remember them hauling my grandfather out when he died of a heart attack in 1956. I found my grandmother dead in the same house 20 years later,also dead from a heart attack.

What is your earliest memory?

I have memories of being in my crib as an infant, likely a year or so old, just playing in my crib, fascinated by reflected spots of sunlight on the ceiling. I clearly remember waking up on my third birthday, walking down the steps and sitting on the bottom step hands on chin, then my mother walking out of the kitchen and seeing me there, asking me if I knew what day it was. I said yes, it’s my birthday. She asked how old I was, and I held up three fingers and said three years old.

Several. I also found my grandfather dead of a heart attack. He had gone to the outhouse, and I found him there. Ran in to my Mom and said "Grampa's asleep and I can't wake him up." I was three at the time.

I also vividly recall trying to ride my tricycle down the basement steps. Twice. Because I just knew it was possible. I still have a tiny scar from that experiment. Different house than the above, so I was perhaps four.

I was 3 years old and it was also a trauma related event.

The Alamo?????

Thats interesting, I'm thinking trauma will over whelm this thread but we will see how it unfolds.

I had one of those little toy pistols that looked like a miniature 1911 and shot the darts with a suction cup on the tip. I must have worn out a dozen of them over the years. I was 3 years old.

My mom was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper,...had it up in front of her face.

I said "Hey!",....She dropped the newspaper down to see what I wanted and I shot her square in the left eye with it.

She grabbed her face with both hands,..then pulled them down and looked at me with her eye all wadded up and a mean expression on her face.

Then she rapidly rolled up the newspaper and started chasing me around the apartment flogging me on the head with it.

Then she had to shame me about it, so she stood in front of me with the now frazzled newspaper in one hand, her other hand on her hip,..her eye still wadded all up and said,

"Now you've done put my eye out! What am I going to do?! How am I going to see?!"

,...scared hell out of me. I think it was because it's the first time I had ever seen an adult "go off" like that.

60 years later and I can still play the event in my mind like a movie clip.

My brother tells me he can remember being in mom's womb!

For me, I can remember taking a bath with my mom and being embarrassed. I remember in which house we lived, so I was probably three or four. I don't think she ever bathed with me again. She must have sensed something.

3 years old. I climbed up the front of a large book case that went up to the ceiling.,
The entire thing fell on top of me. I was lucky that day...


Same year, I drank an entire 4oz bottle of hoppe's gun cleaner, and had to get my stomach pumped... That sucked.

I remember my bedroom when I was 2, the curtains with little nutcracker style men on them, the arrangement of the room, the color of the carpet and I remember falling head first down the stairs from the 2nd floor (that my room was on) to the first floor and hitting the coffee table at the bottom. We moved to a different town shortly after, so I know the memory was from when I was 2.

From my event and reading others, it seems like a trauma event or something of significance is what "sets" that memory in our minds. I'm sure that falling down the stairs that day is why I remember the details of the event and my room.

Yeah, I can replay mine too.
My 3 year old traumatic event was mother related too. I didn't shoot her but I should have.

I really L O L...

lol,...My mom wouldn't hurt me. The rolled up newspaper was just a thin section. Mostly it was a symbolic statement that I has *really* pissed her off.

There is an incident that could have only happened in May of 1959, 9 months after I was born. I distinctly remember 5 adults hold me down and attempt to put salve in my eyes. I remember fighting them off and winning. The way I know this is that the only time I got that salve was that this was my first spring, and I got an annual spring allergy. The first year was particularly bad, and they gave me a shot of penicillan. I had a reaction and it caused me to swell up and my eyes to swell shut. My father was on the bottom of the pile, sitting in his big overstuffed chair. My mom held the salve. My grandparents and a babysitter were holding my limbs.

I also have a vivid memory of using the Venetian blinds to climb out of my crib. That was later on that summer. They had to move my crib and put extenders on the sides to keep me in.


EDIT: It just dawned on me that the information I just gave you could be used to come up with a fairly exact date. That particular baby sitter came on Fridays when I was a kid to watch me while my mom and grandmother did their shopping for the week. Dad was home, so that was after 3 PM. Grandpa was there, so that put it more around 4-5 PM. My allergy always seemed to peak just before Memorial Day. I checked the calendar, and I'm going to say the incident occurred after 3PM on 22 May, 1959.

Tits. Mostly the right one but I remember both of em.

Standing up in the back seat hanging onto the back of the front seat while the old man dropped the hammer to the floor in a 70 Chevelle SS-396

Maybe I was 3 yrs old

I was about 3. I have 2 memories. One was my grandmother in an old gray sweater in the living room. The other was watching some friends help Dad with an addition to the house. Dad had torn out the end of the house then got polio. At the time, Dad was in the hospital and our friends pitched in to get the addition closed in before winter. Dad was one of the lucky ones who made a full recovery but he was gone for 4 months.

😆 hilarious!

JFK's funeral. I remember the caisson with the coffin and the rider-less horse with the boots facing backwards. I had just turned 2 years old.

Going to a picnic with my father and going home with my mother.

watching my mother wash clothes in the creek below the house i was born in. must have been 2.

That stuff sure smells good. How'd it taste ?

Doing my version of water boarding my younger brother in a wading pool

Todd dont swim till this day

Told him many decades ago why.

Fugg him.......

Scars that dont heal....

Moving into a new house[I was bout 2-1/2] wanting to help carry stuff upstairs but they wouldn't let me. Also remember a party of sorts in the backyard of that same house, the first summer there I guess.

I must have been about 3 when our next door neighbors had a 55 Chevy convertible. She was friends with my mom and they would take it out and go driving with the top down occasionally,...put me in the back seat. I always enjoyed that even though I was so small that I couldn't see over the seat in front of me.

I can't remember the woman's name by she was a very pleasant sort. She'd occasionally look over her shoulder and ask, "Is that too much wind on you?" I'd shake my head "no",.....and my mom would say, "He's alright".

Hell,I forgot!

I must've been between two and two and a half years old. Mom, Dad and I had been somewhere in our car, came home, walked in the door and there in our living room sitting on the coffee table was a cardboard cutout toy circus set up with little animals, clowns, big top, ringmaster, etc. I'd never seen anything so wonderful.

Around the same age too my mom's brothers and a couple of their friends taking me 'coon hunting with them one night. I remember them carrying me on their shoulders and laughing at having me sing, "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine, I'll get My lovin' in the Evenin' Time". I don't know who had more fun, me or them.

I also remember riding the city bus at around three by myself to the babysitter's house. Small town, everybody knew everybody, Mom put me on the bus, I sat right behind the bus driver, he knew where to let me off, the babysitter's kids, all high school age met me at the bus stop right in front of their house. Mom or dad picked me up.

The earliest thing I can remember was being held by someone, in a cool dim cavern type place with the sound of water dripping. There was some green wooden stairs and banisters there also. Fast forward 20 plus years, I take my new bride to the Bandera Volcano and Ice Cave and I'm hit with Deja Vu and I see the remnants of green wooden stairs and banisters. My dad was still alive then so I asked him if we had ever been there. He produced a picture taken in 1955 of my grandmother holding me, standing on the green wooden stairs at the Ice Cavern.

I was 14 months old at the time.

One of my earliest vivid memories was of my father shooting a squirrel. We were visiting my grandparents and gramps told dad they were having trouble with squirrels getting in the attic. A little while later dad saw a squirrel in a tree next to the house. He grabbed gramps shotgun out of the closet and went out and blasted that squirrel. I remember it seemed really loud and I thought it was cool as hell. I think I was probably 2-3 years old at the time.

Lucky you.......

I remember coming home at night from somewhere with my parents and my older brother had fallen asleep in the car so my dad layed him down on the couch while they got situated. I remember the couch, the furniture, everything. Just a memory I never tried to analyze so many years went by. My mom found an old photo album that we were looking through together and I see a family photo of them in that living room. It hit me, and I told my mom I remembered that room and the night we came home etc. My mom looked at me and said that she was about 7 or 8 months pregnant with me when they moved out of that house, and that I never saw that house. Twilight zone chit.

Sticking my thumb in Moms ringer washing machine on the side porch of the little cabin we lived in at HWY 10 and Higgenbotham Rd. circa 1966, I was three.

I was 3 1/2. My mom locked us out of our apartment and she was crying because she didn't have enough money to buy milk for my sister on her first birthday. Mom and Dad had moved to Montana for a job with mom's uncle. He turned out to be an alcoholic who would be on a binge for a couple weeks at a time. No job, no money except what dad could pick up working wherever he could. Part time pumping gas, etc.

I have many memories, but can't tie any specific event to a specific age. More of them are "snapshots" rather than "movies".

Bacon. Age 2.

Then at 2 1/2 i fell off the pier at Palacios into the bay. Mom dove in and grabbed me. Then coming to having artificial resuscitation laying on the pavillion hardwood floor.

We lived in a two room house on the Triangle Ranch. The cowboys had to ride right in front of our house when leaving or coming back to the corral. I opened the front yard gate and ran ito the road when I heard, or saw, them coming in. Daddy reached down and got me by the arm and swung me up in front of him and let me ride to the saddle shed.

I was a couple months shy of three years old, and it’s my first memory that could be tied to a particular time.

I did that when I was around four, I had my entire arm in the damn thing before they got it shut off. It was bouncing off my face. Haven’t though if that in years.
I still cringe when I see one

LOL, that's it, full power to boot, mom was standing close, shut it off, and got my thumb outta there, and yes, it hurt like hell, those rollers are soft rubber, no? she ran em through after the wash cycle then hung it all out on clothes lines in the yard, I remember our big german shepherds running and jumping around through and the bed sheets on the line in the warm breezy days.

About 3 years old I remember staying up late with mom to watch the Honeymooners waiting for dad to get home from work. Mom used to buy me those French fries that come in a can like Pringle’s for our late night Honeymooners-wait for dad fest and I can remember it like yesterday. Also about 3 years old mom and I went to the five and dime and bought a couple of strings of Christmas lights to put on the railing outside the house we lived in at the time and when I woke up the next morning some older kids down the street had cut them. I was so mad but my grandpa fixed them. Also the same age there was a fully involved structure fire and mom and I went over to bring ice and water to the firemen. I was captivated by their toughness and bravery and from that moment on I wanted to be a firefighter.

I had a great childhood and a great family full of love and discipline. I only wish that I could’ve had more time with my grandpa and my mom because you couldn’t find two people more full of love for their family than those two amazing people.

Just in general,...we weren't dirt poor or anything like that. But there wasn't much money for extras, especially early on.

I have lots of memories of living in a little house next door to my grandparents that didn't have running water while my dad was building our house on another piece of property about a half mile away.

I turned 4 in that house. It sat on 3 acres and I had the run of it. It was bordered by a deep, dry western Kentucky creek on 2 sides.

My father and grandfather would be off at work and my mother and grandmother were usually involved doing the chores of the day and I just wandered around the place exploring.

Even though I was little more than a toddler, it ranks as one of the happiest years of my life.

Run around the place all day free as a bird,....spoiled rotten by both my mother and grandmother,...vanilla ice cream anytime I wanted it, and when night came we'd sit in the dark watching a B&W TV while eating popcorn until bedtime.

In my four year old mind,...when I bothered to think about it at all, I thought life would be like that forever.

It was all I knew and it was all I needed to know.

Even the good times I experienced later in life can't compare to that year running free, loosely supervised, on my grandparents property when I was 4 years old.

I remember them telling me not to fuuck with it or it was going to get me. I learn most things the hard way.

I have some real early memories but don't know which one would be earliest. I have a dim memory of one great grandmother. Only great grandparent still alive when I was born in 1950. She passed just before I turned 5 at age 84 or 85. Back then I could recall being at my grandparents house and I thought they looked really old; they were both early 50's at the time. But there was one lady there that almost made them both look young. When I was about 5 and a half or 6 I saw some family photos and saw that real old looking lady and remembered seeing her. It was my great grandmother. I had forgotten all about that until I saw the pictures and if that hadn't refreshed my memory at that young age I'm sure that as I grew up I would have had no memory of seeing her. If it hadn't been for photography I'm sure that I would have lost that one small memory.

I also remember the New York World's Fair, being pushed around in a stroller and seeing little dinosaur figures on the ground. I was three, so that wasn't nearly my earliest memory, but still quite young.

About 1.5-2 y/o....

I kept looking for a missing toy. Later in life I realized that this wasn't about that toy, it was about my mom who left me, my baby twin sister and our toddler sisters when she walked out on my dad and the rest of us for another man.

Wow! That sucks.

Mellorine. It, or something, made freezers smell good.

Birth.

Riding my tricycle barefoot on my grandparents porch and stubbed my toe and it started bleeding so I started crying. Uncle who was a teenager came outside and starting laughing at me for crying. Almost 40 years later and I still don't like him

My Great Grandfather,....
"Noey" (Noah) Bristoe,...the musician,....Fiddlin' champion of Ballard County Kentucky until he decided not to be,...

,...how he'd eat apples by holding it in his hand and slicing off pieces with his pocket knife.

One day he hoisted me up in his lap while he was eating an apple,...told me to cut me off a slice while handing me his knife.

My mom told him that wasn't a good idea,...but he did it anyway.

So I sliced off a piece of his apple and laid the palm of his hand wide open in the process.

I thought I would be in trouble,....."I didn't mean to",....."I didn't mean to",.....but he just laughed as my mom said, "I told you so!,...I told you so!

Then he went out on the back porch and stuck his bleeding hand down in the WW2 era Jerry can full of coal oil that we kept out there to start fires in the wood stove.

Noey Bristoe with my great grandmother, "Rene" and their daughter, my grandmother, "Mae",....long before even my mother was born.

I remember my grandmother laughing at me for still drinking from a bottle at two years old. I was forced to start drinking from cups on my third birthday. The bottles were all tossed.

I remember when that doctor slapped me on the butt. I got back at him 20 years later, when I slapped one of his nurses on the butt.

Signing up for 24hourcampfire.......life didn’t exist before that moment in time! Actually, when I was 4 or 5, I “snuck” into my parents closet, a got my finger stuck in the carrier assembly ( where you insert the shells). Couldn’t pull finger back out ( think of a Chinese finger trap). Had to go to my Dad, with my finger stuck in his Model 12. I’ve had a fear of shotguns, ever since! memtb

Hmm. They usually ask me what’s the last thing you remember.

I guess it was pretty good, I finished off the whole bottle myself !!
But I bet it was better going in, than out, at the hospital.

I’m thinkin’ they may have changed the recipe by now. That was back in 1950.

Lots of childhood memories I cant peg down to a specific age even with help from parents. Probably most are under 5 years.

Now a days, that’s a harder question to answer.

My dad's mother had 2 plastic cups with straws built into them. When there was only 2 grandkids there, it was easy, when there was more, someone was going to be an angry grandkid. Grandma is 94, still living on her own and I believe she still has those 2 plastic cups. Speaking of cups, we've used the same Tupperware olive green, harvest orange, and pale yellow cups at grandmas for as long as I can remember. She's got little ones for kids and big ones for adults.

Like someone else mentioned, I have flashes not movie reels. Grandpa was the Standard Oil Jobber and I remember riding in the gas truck, sledding behind the small tractor he had, riding the John Deere pedal tractor. Dad and Grandpa took me Antelope hunting with them in SD in Grandpa's '76 full-time 4WD Chevy. I remember pulling the range lever into N because I was "helping" drive riding in the middle between them. Dad deep frying popcorn shrimp and onion rings in a house we moved out of when I was 3. Pushing the emergency stop on the escalator at the downtown JC Penny or Sears ~3-4yrs old and mom being embarrassed and pissed-off at the same time.

I remember being in a warm cozy place and all of a sudden it was like being in an earthquake.Someone grabbed my head and then smacked me on the ass,I was pissed.

A PM from Fireball's wife.

In my teens, I remember telling my Mom how I remember being in the hospital and how she had left and I was standing in the crib looking out the door of the room I was in. Then I saw her red jacket flash past the door as she tried to sneak out of there without me seeing her. I screamed bloody murder and she came back in the room and picked me up and held me.

Mom said "how on earth do you remember that?? You were one and in there with pneumonia!"


I remember it vividly.

I'm thinking this one got past a few. Lol.

I still have a scar on my wrist from one of those God damned things 50 fifty years ago.

Heck, I was still breastfeeding at that age!

Chewing the plastic bill off of my Captain Kangaroo doll during a forced nap.

Sorry hanco but that made me LOL!

I remember going to my Grand mothers house, she would call and tell my Mom that she had fresh applesauce cake for me. She knew it was my favorite.

She was around 80 living in the old homestead I remember walking to the spring with her no running water and only recently electric and a phone.

She pasted away by the time I was 4 so these memories would be from age 3.

Got a hot cup of coffee spilled on my arm. A bit before 4. Mouthful of soap about this time for calling our dumb dog a n i g g e r. {mom not dad} And seeing a bobcat in the yard.

Yah, that's a good one!

I don't remember.

I remember breast feeding on mom........Boy it'd be great to be 16 again........

Lmao. And you said I ain’t right..

Honestly, I have no idea how old I was. Certainly before I could walk, because I was still in a play pen. But there was a lady up the street from us, Maggie Allen. She was one of the nicest dearest white haired ladies you could hope to know. Always smiling and talking kind. She died when I was a teenager and was one of the saddest days of my young life. I think it's amazing some things you remember. This was certainly the better part of 70 yrars ago.

I was 3 when I first got to eat French fries and burger with lots of ketchup , I sure remember that. No one was mean to me but I was left alone a lot to play with dust motes in the sunshine while chewing on leaded paint chips in an ozone depleted atmosphere and still not sure but somewhere in there a woman touched my penis. It all had one hell of an effect on me. I am still Conservative, vote Republican, shoot lead bullets ,appreciate shapely women and have never been PC. MB

He was a strong swimmer in those days.....grin

About 3, being chased by a rooster. About 4, the old woman that baby sat me making homemade bread... Still love homemade breads and yeast rolls...

People think I’m nuts when I tell them this, but I remember the day I was born. I have to this day, a memory of coming out of a darkness into the light and being surrounded by people in surgical masks. I know it sounds kind of cliché, but it’s what I remember. I’ve read about these type of memories, and there are others who have similar memories. I’ve also read that an infant has no capacity to remember. Maybe it was a dream I had when I was young, but it has stuck with me for 55 years.

It wasn’t too damn funny at the time.😊

Trauma related and some things you can never forget.

Holding on to Dad’s left nut to keep from getting shot into a n i g g a h woman.

During the early 1940's my folks had a 1938 Chevy coupe with a little shelf back of the seat, I remember lying back there when we would go for a ride somewhere. I was no older than 2 1/2 at the time. Around the same time, at the Torrey Lake Ranch outside of Dubois WY, I wandered off and got into a corral with a big ol' bull. I still remember the fuss my Mom made about this, and my Dad scrambling in there to grab me up and get me back over the corral fence.

About 3 1/2 yo,I was running across my god mother's brick patio with a stick (after being forewarned) and tripped and stuck that stick under my right eye. Eye was saved but I still remember that fenestrated drape coming down over my face so they could sew up my face.

Lolol....I got a mouth full of Ivory soap (99 44/100% pure 😁) for calling my little brother a fa.g....actually I was yelling it over and over at the top of my lungs....I didn’t know what a fa.g was so when mom told me I had no idea that some dude could do that to another dude....it still dumbfounds me that any guy could do that....fugging fa.gs.

I have friends who say they don't remember much of anything before second grade or thereabout. OTOH I remember all kind of stuff from when I was two.

When I was 3, I remember that my Father had a big cookout for 25 or so of his closest USMC buddies from WW2 in July 1958.

With wives and kids, there must have been around 120 people, so there was a never ending line of women waiting to use the toilet. The men and boys were forced to pee in back of the barn.

EDIT: That same summer my Parents rented a camp on Mascoma Lake in Enfield, NH, that had a Boston & Maine railroad track behind the camp. I had a little folding lawn chair with green webbing that someone placed where I could hear/watch/feel the trains and the Budd cars traveling between West Lebanon and Concord, NH.

I remember playing in sand box with my younger brother. I was 3-4 years old. Also remember falling about eight feet through a trap door in grandfathers barn, specifically crying and dad carrying me in his arms to the house. I was probably four. And these occasions were in the early 50s.

About 2 yrs old..... Parents rented a house from Mrs. Matchner (sp). I dont remember the house too much, but the yard I played in. Had a RR track running behind the house and the steam engines would come by, sometimes 2 or 3 pulling the cars. The yard was fenced and there was a shed in the yard. Also, had a push mower. I could just barely lift the handle, pushing the mower was out of the question.

Standing at the balcony watching my mom talking to a woman.

My earliest memories are of a fly in trip to Canada with my Mom and Dad. The bush plane had one seat for the pilot. Everyone else sat on sleeping bags, or whatever they could cobble together to be more comfortable. I remember being on my dad's lap. I also remember getting a bath on that trip in a Coke cooler.

Lol, I Never claimed to be..............

First thing I remember was my father beating me.

Man, I know a lot of friends growing up like this. ........break the chain! I’m a West Virginia hillbilly dumbass and I broke it. I’m so sorry for the ship you went thru, but I promise you that it can and will be better.

I thought you were gonna tell us that the cat kept trying to cover y’all up.

This pisses me off, When I was 15 I had this bud whose dad was a worthless drunk, one night Randy and I came home 15 minutes late, the old man was in a drunken stupor and started beating on Randy, I'd never seen anything like this in my life before and was quite shocked, I grabbed a 2x4 lying against the wall and I clock the old man upside the head and knocked him out fuggin' cold.

Randy and I took off and ended up at a elementary school playground and spent the night sleeping there. Randy told mke that the old man would do this every once in awhile and that we were probably dead when we returned home.

We went home the next morning and the old man gave me the stink eye but never said a word about it, a few weeks later the old man took to beating on Randy again, well randy had had enough and grabbed a shovel and knocked the baster out cold again.

The Old man never touched him again after that.

Making a snake out of modeling clay behind the couch...I wasn't quite 2 years old...

Flashes, bits and pieces of being in the hospital to have my tonsils out. Similar flashes of my older sister and I having chicken-pox @ the same time.

Probably about 3 years old - my first airplane crash.

I had a metal toy pedal airplane that is the good news - the bad news is that we had a porch with no guard railing and it was about 6 ft off the ground, to this day I can still remember going off of it, well at least the on the way down part.
Outside of a couple of bruises and scrapes I wasn't hurt at all but it sure ruined the airplane.

drover

The first thing I remember knowin' was a lonesome whistle blowin'

I was born in Rochester, MN. I have lots of "snapshot" memories of our time there. Nothing exciting or traumatic, just pictures. We moved from there when I was about 3, so that gives me some frame of reference.

Bouncing in one of those little swingy-thingees that they used to hang off the door jam. I was just a baby and don't really remember anything else from that period.

Another infant or toddler memory I have:

I wasn't able to talk yet so I was pretty young.

My grandparents on my Dad's side moved a mobile home into the home place because the old farm house was getting unlivable. They had a had a little white plastic cow up on a shelf in this mobile home and I remember pointing at it and looking at grandma and grandpa until one of them would get it down for me to play with. I recall doing that every time we visited.

Can't say how old that I was, but young. At my Grandmothers on my Mothers side, and getting out of the truck, and in my Mothers arms. Everyone was crying and I kept wanting to know why, but I did not understand death. Grandmother had died, but I was too young to understand, but I knew everybody crying was not right. When I was older but not a lot, I remember my Mother picking me up to look at my Grandmother's, Sister, on my Dad's side, Laying in a coffin. miles

I remember standing holding the bars on my crib, I remember our grandma from America coming to visit us and her telling me I needed to slow down in my walker in the park. About that same age too 18 mos? I got a sick with a really high fever so they called the ambulance to take me to the hospital, I remember being in the back of that 1950's British ambulance which even to me back then looked small, and I remember the caps and uniforms on the British Ambulance Service guys, and the bell, ambulances didn't have sirens back then, they had bells.

Fortunately that whole circumcision thing way back in the 'States before then has gone right by me Prob'ly a repressed memory waiting for the right time........