Spinoff: on the How Old threadFollow

What is your first real memory of child hood? The How Old thread brought back one I hadn't thought of in years, what is yours?

I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and got scared and started crying trying to get back to my room because the hall light was off and it was really dark. My mom came out of her bedroom and helped me back. I was 2

Okay, I'll bite.

I'm sitting on the floor next to the stairs in the house and wishing I could slide down the banister like my older sisters and brother were allowed to.

According to my father, I was younger then 14 months, when this took place. My mom identified the house from a picture I drew for art class and my father later said we moved when I was 14 months old, instead of 18 months my mom remembered.

The next few memories had to happen in one of the 3 houses we lived in Pittsburgh before I was 5 and 1/2. We moved a lot when I was small due to my father changing his careers and my mom's migraines due to allergy to steel mills.

And I thought I was all deep and brooding as a toddler.

I had some sort of leftovers for lunch yesterday.

My mom, no fan of TV, sat me down in front of the television.(I was 3 at the time.)

On the screen was a big, shiney rocket. If I wandered off, back in front of the TV I went...for the next several days.

It was the Apollo 11 moon shot.

I can remember sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room and pooing in my pants. I think I was three.

I was two or three. I was outside in the summertime, no shirt, frolicking around the front yard, walking on top of the garden hose as if it were a balance beam.

Samira, your memory is so very..... Samira.

I have one singular memory from the age of 2: looking at the disused luge track leftover from the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

Besides that, I have a couple dozen memories from the age of 3: hiding under the porch deck, making fun of the Tums commercial jingle, a nightmare where I got bit by a vampire, watching Danger Mouse on TV, eating Giggles Cookies, being tricked by an older kid with an alligator clicker, etc.



Edited, May 20th 2009 6:14pm by trickybeck

I'm kind of irritated that I can't remember anything before I was around 4. I remember reading my first book in 1st grade, and being so far ahead of the class in reading that everyone thought I was faking.

I remember a really hot summer when I was 4 or 5, and I was playing on the floor in the living room at our old house. The whole family had the flu, like bad, with horrible fevers. My dad had it so bad that my mom had to help him to the bathroom. I remember him lumbering really slowly in his underwear, my mom's tiny hands not doing much to support his huge frame, into the hallway. I had been playing with a little toy workbench earlier, and it was still on the floor.

A short while later, my dad came shuffling back into the living room, my mom right behind him. Just as he passed through the doorway, he just passed out. He fell towards me in slow motion, face first. He was in his underwear, so my mom had nothing to grab on to. He faceplanted right onto my toy bench, the corner of it catching the edge of his glasses, which shattered. I don't remember how he got up after that and laid on the couch, his eyelid bleeding. He still has a scar there.

I remember feeling guilty that he fell so slowly, but I didn't think to get the workbench out of his way.

2 memories, both around 3:

Pushing a chair up to the counter and making the difficult climb up onto the counter surface so as to reach the container of oatmeal on the top shelf. I looked down at the floor and was scared because I was so high up, but I managed to climb back down. I then proceeded to the fish tank in the living room and poured the entire contents of said oatmeal into the tank. A few minutes later, my mom came in the room and I proudly proclaimed while pointing at the fish tank "I feed the fish."

Went to a pet store and took three small colored rocks (5 cents each I believe). My mom saw them in the fish tank later and asked me where they came from. I cried and told her I had taken them. She took me back to the store and I apologized to the shopkeeper. I think she (the clerk) thought it was adorable.

I was very young, under a year old. I was at my grandparent's house, visiting them with my mother. My mom and grandmother were in the kitchen talking and I had been napping in my playpen in the living room. I remember lying there in semi-darkness. I could see the light from the kitchen. Then my mom came in to check on me. She saw that I was just hanging out, being quiet and good, so she left me there and went back to the kitchen. I may have gone back to sleep after that. But that few seconds of memory is so very vivid. I can even remember her dress was green and my playpen was a hideous brown-ish color.

Pretty sure I was less than one.

I was being lowered face-down, to be put to bed in a drawer from a chest of drawers that had been taken out of the chest, laid on the floor of a bedroom, and made up as a bed. There was padding for a matress, and everything like a proper little cot, with sheets and my little crotched blanket, except it was a drawer. And at something-under-one I was startled and curious and recognised it as unusual enough to have retained the memory.

It was very late afternoon, with golden sunlight streaming in to the partially stained glass "Arts and Crafts" window. Not that I knew the architectural era and term for the type of window at the time, but I remember it clearly, and could identify it's type later.

I don't why I was ever put to sleep in that hastily contrived cot one evening.