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    Joined: Feb 2011
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    "This yellow dress is really itchy. Think I'll take it off. Oops-- maybe it's the tights. I should take them off, as well. They are really in the way of taking off that ruffly thing on my butt."


    (I was 14-17mo old, because that dress wouldn't have fit me at 2, btw, and it was a summer dress which would not have been appropriate even indoors beyond October given our latitude-- and it WAS itchy. It had scratchy lace at the collar and sleeves.)

    "Swans look really lovely, but they are decidedly un-serene up close. OW!! mad Note to self; they bite. I do NOT like swans."

    "Wet clothing is very unpleasant. Slightly less so than wet shoes, however."

    "Tights are the devil's handiwork."

    "I think grandma was kind of unreasonable to be mad about me wading into the pond to feed the wood ducks. It wasn't that cold. I was just wet, and I took care of that by taking my clothes off. She seemed especially upset by me leaving my shoes in the pond."

    "I don't know why mom freaks out about me playing with the cows. They like me, and they are warm and pleasant. I like their long eyelashes."


    "wow, dad sure seems upset. Wow again, though-- this is a LOT of blood!! I wonder how much blood a person has inside them, anyway? Why does dad keep asking me why I shoved that up my nose?? Like I have an answer for that?" blush Yeah, okay-- this latter is an approximation, but I do rather vividly recall his beet-red face screaming (presumably rhetorical?) questions at me as I meekly held a sopping towel to my face while he drove me half an hour to the nearest ER. Hot-wheels car wheel, incidentally. Nope. No more idea now than when I was 16mo. Which is when that happened.




    I also ate dog food-- though I don't have such a clear recollection of this activity, or my reasoning. I can recall what Purina dog chow tastes like, however. Not good pretty much sums it up.

    I remember political events from news broadcasts. I know that they are rather unedited memories by virtue of the nature of the content-- we moved far enough away from Canadian broadcasting when I was a bit less than three that any of my memories that include those features predate that move. I remember them well, and I can recall spirited discussions about those current events from my parents, who were, um, "diverse" in their political and social leanings.

    My entire life, this latter point has placed me solidly in a cohort of peers who share those childhood memories-- without most of them realizing that I'm actually 3-5 years younger than they are. My friends recall Watergate so well because they were ten (when Nixon resigned). I turned four that summer. I recall it better than DH does, and he was nine.

    DD recalls 9/11 from news footage of it. Now, no doubt she recalls it primarily because of media reinforcement of her actual experiences on the day (when she was just two) but she definitely didn't have much media exposure at the time. We had a clear sense that she took in a LOT of what went on around her, and we went to considerable lengths to avoid additional exposure beyond that incidental, shocked 20 minutes or so during midday wall-to-wall media coverage as events unfolded.

    Still-- six months later, she expressed (in very child-like terms) TERROR of "tall" structures, and worry that they would "fall down" spontaneously... and worry about airplanes flying into things and making them fall down. UN-prompted. This was during an inconsolable meltdown during her first major road trip since the events themselves. It took some fifteen minutes or more to get it out of her what exactly had her sobbing with fear and distress. Her recall of those events was every bit as good as that of her 12yo classmates when they were in middle school together. Her agemates, typically? Not so much.


    I also have a few memories which were "misattributions" for a long time-- that is, they were real memories, just framed all wrong. I prefer to not delve too deeply into those, as many of them are about quite adult situations that no child should have been enduring anyway. Suffice it to say that I have a lot of personal firsthand experience of how being high LOG doesn't really make a person OLDER and better able to process what their brains can take note of and reason about.




    Last edited by HowlerKarma; 01/28/15 03:34 PM.

    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    My oldest memory is at about 3 years old. My younger brother is adopted and I can still picture the living room at the foster home he was staying at where we visited him a few times before bringing him home. Most other preschool memories were reinforced by photographs and stories like the time I broke my arm ice-skating when I was 3. But what I know to be a true memory is going to tumbling class sometime in the next few weeks and being upset I couldn't participate.

    Interestingly the kinds of things I remember from my early elementary are details like how I got to school. (We moved from there after 1st grade.) I can picture the K & 1st grade classroom but none of the kids, except the one I kept in touch with as a pen-pal with for years. I could still draw you a map of the path I walked to school. The layout of the park we lived next to, where was the pond and what playground equipment was there. The layout of the house & furniture we lived in at the time.

    As to things that I remember being framed wrong. I have a very strong memory of being frightened that when my dad went out on a Saturday he was going to fight in the way for the day. (The Vietnam war) In reality he was probably working overtime, I understood he went to work on weekdays. And somewhere under 7 I decided that quarks were the "empty spaces in a cork". My dad worked in high energy physics, and it was a term I had clearly picked up. And I remember inventing the Big Bang in the back of our station wagon on one long car ride and being disappointed when I'd found out I wasn't the first person to come up with the idea.

    And throwing the cat in the pond as a preschooler. I defiantly remember wondering if cats could swim, and deciding to try and experiment. (The can never trusted me after that.)

    Last edited by bluemagic; 01/28/15 04:15 PM.
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    Creepy similarities...

    I asked DD to tell me her earliest memory. It was of sitting in a room for the first time in a home that would soon be ours. Not much detail, just vague impressions. I can definitively set her age at 29 months.

    My oldest memory was of my LAST time sitting in a room as we moved out of a home, with a vague impression of emptiness and few details. I was about her same age.

    When I was four, I had such vivid, recurring dreams of flying that I was convinced it had actually happened. I got mad at my brothers when they laughed at me, because they'd seen me so many times before.

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    My DD can remember way back and still surprises us with the obscure details even from incidents as far back as the twos.

    For myself, I have no memory of anything before two weeks after my third birthday when my mother died - I can vividly remember several incidents right after that. It sucks. I have no memories whatsoever of my mother. Apparently, I could read my grandfather articles from the newspaper by 2 but then completely forgot even how to read until about 7 having been raised in a home with NT cousins from that point on. Perhaps it is/was hysteria that shut the memories off - who knows....


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    Madeinuk, I'm very sorry to hear about that onset of memory. frown

    I recall clearly snippets from a caravanning holiday when I was 2.5. The car trip at night with my brother and I lying on the back seat (an age before car seats), supposedly to sleep, kicking one another. Being drawn in a cart, kicking one another. Lying on the lower bunk in the caravan, kicking my brother in the top bunk in the back from below. (Do you detect a theme there? :p). And the washrooms on the campground.
    I also recall hitting my head on the door frame after playing tag with my brother on socks in the hallway, again around the age of 2.5. I recall sitting there with my legs to the left and right of the door frame, crying, with the blood running down my face. I also recall lying on the gurney in the ER, being told to look into the light as they stitched me up.
    I recall wearing a diaper, and being toilet trained, stuffing my undies with toilet paper in the bathroom because I thought it was a great training step to wiping myself, and proudly walking to my mom to show her. Given that it was in the seventies and my mom was still washing cloth diapers to save money, it must have been before I was three.

    Last edited by Tigerle; 01/29/15 12:27 AM.
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    My earliest memory is of sitting in the middle of my grandpas rose garden and playing with the lady bugs. My parents had me young, daddy was still in college and my mom worked alot so my grandparents watched me. My grandpa had a giant square if rose bushes all different colors because he never could remember which color was my grandmas favorite lol.

    My son remembers all the ladybug stickers I had on our car. He us very descriptive and remembers them but we sold that car when he was 1 so how he remembers that is beyond me.

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    My earliest memories have no language, sound or sense of time/age. I can not place which came first, only that most likely around 3ish and they are all like random snapshots. There are a few that can be linked to age three due to the specific events - when we moved, and the massive wildfire around the same year, I believe, when we had to evacuate - I can remember the fire trucks coming, my dad driving in one car and that orange glow the sky turns in those wildfires, and the flames - and the charred landscape afterwards - for some reason, our house was spared but there were houses burned out not far from ours. The early memories are definitely shaped by the lack of language and awareness of the world beyond my visual field I had prior to age 3/4 - my later memories start to reflect my awareness and context of the world and people around me that my earliest memories don't have.

    I know my parents earliest memories are shaped by war (my father was 2 or 3 when WWII ended and he once said he still remembers the bombings and the constant move to stay ahead of the Russians, and my mother's earliest memories are related to the war in her country at the same time).

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    I remember back to around 2 or slightly before. Most of my oldest memories are just like a picture, a wall or the view down the stairs. I remember the layouts of homes we lived in very young. I remember our cars and random moments in them, such as sitting in a truck with my dad reviewing state capitols at a little under 3 while my brother was being born. I remember times when I threw up and a few different occasions when I had nose bleeds. I remember the flavors or antibiotic I had to take for ear infections and various "pictures" of them sitting in the refrigerator. Most of the stuff I remember my parents have no memory of or occasionally when I mention it their memories are jogged. After 3 I remember almost everything. I not only remember everything everyone says, but also where we were when it was said and what positions we were in. I never forget anything anyone has told me. I am not a good person to lie to!

    My son just turned 5, so it's hard to say if he will follow in my footsteps. He has a great memory for facts (knew all of his states at 24 months, could count to 1000 by 3, easily learned the months/days of the week, remembers the order of songs on his CD's, etc.) and often amazes me with his comments on early memories. What is odd is that he always says how old he was, I can't believe his sense of time. He might say "One time when I was about two and a half we went to Grandma's house and the dishwasher was broken". I'm not amazed that he remembers that, I'm amazed that when I look back at my memories I am able to place it in the summer and checking it against the other things that occurred that trip, at age 2.5. I'm not sure how he could have a concept of time so strong that he can date his memories so well from when he was so young.

    I have asked him if he remembers being inside of my belly and he says no. He also doesn't remember a lot of baby things I have asked about. If he sees a baby toy though he seems to recognize it and knows if it was a favorite. I assume through some visual/emotional vague memory thing. He has also been trying to remember how to say hello in Russian for the last 3 days and keeps forgetting... then again, so do I! Looks like he may be taking after me at being really good at one language, and completely inept at learning any others (except sign, we both pick right up on that).

    Anyway, memory is so interesting to me and I really enjoyed reading this thread smile

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    DD remembers an incident from when she was 18months, and several from age 2. I'm not sure about DS. He doesn't have quite the memory she does.

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    My earliest memory is from when I had just turned 3 and was in foster care. My foster mom at the time insisted I only wear these tall, lace socks that you had to fold down. I HATED them and I hated that she made me do it by myself. I remember struggling to put them on right and being worried that they looked weird because I didn't have the dexterity to fold them over correctly on my own.

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