Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Earliest memories of your DCs

I am curious: DD has remember a few things that date when she was btw 3 and 6 months old. Things that she had no way of knowing by other means because we never make any comment on it.

For example, she remembered the way DH used to give her her vitamine D drops - by using his finger and letting DD lick it. DH stop it when she was 3/4 months old because she had teeth and was biting. We never comment on that with anyone or with ourselves and we did not use that method when DS was born.

She remember as well that her movil was turning. Again, we retire it when she was 6ish months old because she was sitting and grabing it.

And the other day I told her: when you were a little baby you used to say 'agjuuu'
and she looked at me and say 'yes, when I wanted to nurse'. Needeless to say, this was exactly the case.

She remembers this things once, and when you ask again she has re-forgotten and comes up with a funny made up story.

Do your DCs have memories like this?

I bet that If post this in a 'normal' parenting forum I will be accused to trolling!

Last year DS11 gave me a beautiful discription of learning to talk. Not sure how much faith to put in it, but I found it so moving!

I'll do my best to reproduce it -

It takes so long to learn to talk because in the begining you never know what sound is going to come out. You have to hold your throat a certian way, hoping to make a sound, and then try, and then listen to hear if it was right, and sometimes it isn't.

I got chills when I heard it. My son isn't one of those kids that give long detailed discriptions of things, real or fanciful.

Ask you children what it was like in the uterus, and being born, etc.
Trinity

Hi Dottie,
No dear, it's not your own guilt, although it's worthwhile to journal or share or whatever about whatever guilt you do have.

I'm sure that she has a memory of this, although she probably isn't verbally aware of it. What does she say when you ask her? Does this relate at all to the other thread?

Personally I believe that everyone remembers everything that has ever happened to them, but that most of the time it's "lost on the hard disk." Memories that came in before much language are tough to locate, but when you watch movies of dogs who find their way home when the family moves across the U.S., or ET who finally gets to go home, does she cry more than the others? That's a way to "work on" those early hurts.

((shrug))
My view anyway....
Trinity

Last summer DD5 changed her name. We thought it was cute at first, but after several months she would not allow us or anyone to call her by her given name.. She introduced herself by her chosen name very matter of fact. For a while we tried to talk her out of it, I realized she was serious and I really like the name we gave her.
Finally I told her: "Well, we gave you your name when you were born and you couldn't speak for yourself then. If you really want to change your name I guess it is okay."

She replied: "Mom, I tried to tell you that my name is .....when I was a baby, but you didn't understand what I was saying"

Really?, or is she just being cute and creative? Who knows-*shrug*

Really.
I think it's the total dignity of even infants that is so hard to swallow in our conditioned "one must work to earn one's value" world. Children are wonderful examples of the idea that every human life has great value and deserves respect.

LOL - during some of DS11 countless hours of testing, he was asked, at age 9 to complete the sentence - 'My Mind....'

His completion?

'--- has a mind of it's own!'

someone else must have loved this line, because it made it into the report!

Smiles,
Trinity

The Mary Poppins books have fabulous dialogs with mary and babies that no one else can hear. then at some point the babys "normalize" and can't talk any more.
that kind of quirkiness didn't make it into the disney movie.

This is an interesting discussion. My DD age 3 regularly chats about her birth and "monsters" being there when she was born. Well, I had a c-section so everyone there was fully gowned and masked, so who knows? She also said she was up in the sky floating before she was born. She has spoke about a couple other incidents during her first year with such certainty, I wonder if it's actually a memory. She has a very vivid imagination and has invented a place called rainbow land and a fictional sister that doesn't live with us, so sometimes it's hard to know when she's imagining and when's she's remembering.

That's really good!!!!

About the memories: I am pretty certain these are memories of DD, especially the thing with the vitamine D because we never mentioned it to her or anyone else or discuss btw us,,,

Dottie,

If I ask DD about her earliest memories she gives me a blank stare or makes up a funny story.

She remembers those thing by association of something in the present. It is not a voluntary recall of events.

Anyway, since she is not reading Shakespeare yet I have to bragg with something else, right?

Trinity is right about memory "coding." Here's how it was explained to me; although I have no sources to actually cite. Basically, we have memories from the beginning, and we start to code our memories verbally when we become verbal, around 3 or so. At that time, the recall mechanism becomes verbal as well. So as verbal adults we can retrieve memories back to when we became verbal. Gifted kids who became verbal earlier can retrieve those early memories better because the coding switched from non-verbal to verbal at an earlier date.

The memories from our pre-verbal days are all still in there, but once we become verbal we lack the recall mechanism. Some people who have verbal learning disabilities can also recall the early memories because they never switched over to verbal coding.

I had a friend who had brain surgery and he said that during the surgery and for several days afterwords he very clearly remembered what it felt like to be born. And yes his memory fit with info his mother later told him. Our best guess is that the surgeon must have his the part of the brain that stored the birth memory--it was there but couldn't be recalled.

Wacky! How weird would it be to suddenly remember your birth!? Cool!

Dottie,
I'll bet if you asked your kids the first Math equation they remember they would have lots to say. My DH can remember where he was when he first heard a song or book on tape. Memory is highly personal.
Trin

LOL, these are great stories.
I remember having conversations with my Mom as a young child about things that happened when I was a baby. She didn't believe me. The clearest I have is I was about 4 months old (By Family Lore) and we had gone to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls. I remember riding in a whale stroller and lots and lots of pretty colored lights and really loud noise. Funny thing was, a few years ago, DH and I went to the same place. It was a real strange feeling to sit down and look up and see almost the same image that I've remembered all my life. The only difference was that the lights were much clearer than I remembered. I probably had bad eye sight even as an infant.
I do know that I remember details by association. If someone asks me about something I usually remember where I was and what I was doing before I remember the answer to the question. For eg, If I'm asked "Do you remember how old Sue is?" My answers go something like... Remember when Grandma, you and I were sitting at the kitchen table after Thanksgiving dinner the year Bob got sick? We talked about how Aunt Karen had just had a baby and named her Sue. That means she is 17 years old now.

The earliest memory my son has mentioned was when he was about 2. He remembers us reading The Little Engine That Could to him with all the special voices. However, getting him to remember where he took off his shoes 5 minutes ago is a challenge.

When I opened the Christmas boxes to start decorating for Christmas, DS3 pulled out two small decorative boxes. These boxes were given to him and DS22mo last Christmas from their grandparents. DS3 pulled them right out and said, "Nana and Papa gave these presents to me and (DS22mo name), This one was for me, and this one was for (DS22mo). I couldn't believe he remembered the boxes and which was given to whom (he was 29 mo last christmas).

I wonder what he remembers as a baby...

I'd have to ask dd specifically about her earliest memories but I know that she can recall places that we've been when she was tiny. For example when she was about 2 we had gone to a new home development. About 2 years later we actually went back to the same one and the woman there asked if we had been before. Dh and I said yes, but couldn't remember how long ago it was. DD spoke up and said "It was December, before Christmas. Remember? There was snow on the ground outside and the lady asked if I wanted hot chocolate." Dh and I just smiled and the lady stood there with her jaw open. It was pretty funny cause dd was totally right.

I'm reviving this thread because DS3 spontaneously started discussing events that occurred when he was 1-2 months old that he would have no way of knowing about otherwise. He has been enjoying reliving his babyhood in recent weeks, and yesterday found an old rattle of his in a storage bin while helping me clean and cull clutter. He asked if he had enjoyed the rattle, and I described his favourite rattle and a game he enjoyed playing as a child that involved hitting a toy on his infant gym. He piped up with, "Yes, and sometimes Daddy would guide my hand to help me hit it."

I was impressed that he had a clear memory from when he was 1-2 months old, as my earliest memory is much later (18 months).

I cannot recall which article it was, (perhaps I will search for it later) but I'm pretty sure I read an article in Roeper Review about 20 years ago in which a number of EG children were interviewed about their birth experiences, and quite a few of them were able to recall details that they had never been told, which would otherwise require first person experience to have known.

I would take this with deep skepticism. People can be incredibly wrong about things like whether the kid ever heard something talked about. It is very easy to do this kind of memory research wrong, and arrive at incorrect conclusions.

It is also hugely implausible from a neurological development perspective, even granting that PG brains are different. The neural hardware to form explicit (retrievable) episodic memories simply isn't there in the neonate brain.

Thank you for saying this, MegMeg.

Agreed-- while many individuals in my own family have acquired language very early (and my DD and I are among them)-- her earliest memories are from 10-14mo, and mine from about that age as well. Now, I do know that she genuinely recalls those things, because they reflect incidents, times, and places that she has no context for otherwise (no photos, no family lore surrounding them, etc). They also reflect first-person experiences of sensory/emotional detail that other adults simply weren't aware of from a first-person standpoint.

Anything earlier than ca. 12mo, though, is just-- sensory detail in a way which is incredibly difficult to capture in words. It's not really narrative "memory" the way that most people think of it. I have some memory of objects from younger, and so does DD-- but it's too difficult to say whether or not that memory is something that was subject to later shaping/reinforcement as a toddler, since most of the objects in question were part of that stage in our lives, too. (So I recall the color of my bedroom, but I lived in that house until I was nearly three, so... and DD recalls her bedroom and one bathroom, but we didn't move from the house until she was almost 18mo).


I will also say that I had a number of narrative "memories" as a child which were impossible. Truly just impossible. But I was highly imaginative and had a great capacity for genuinely constructing sensory and emotional detail in my head. I wasn't alive at all for some of those events that I "remembered." I have no idea where this idea came from-- but I can still kind of retrieve the "memory" of it. I've wondered for years where it actually came from, and what it might genuinely represent. I think that it probably was inspired by some real series of events-- it's just that my framing is incorrect.

DD, now 11, had good recall of early events (around age one) when she was about 7 or 8, but she does not have recall of those events now. She remembers remembering them, but doesn't recall if they were true memories or made up. This is in line with normal development and "childhood amnesia."

What impressed me was not the timing of the memories, but their depth and detail (she described learning to read -- or rather beginning to understand the words in the book I was reading to her -- just around the time of her first birthday and she included lots of detail about the birthday itself including the color of the cake and decorations, gifts she'd received, people who were there, etc.). We don't have any photos around (they are all in a giant box marked "organize someday" in the garage -- I know, we are horrible).

She's indifferent to this now, but I find it very poignant that we lose most of these early experiences as we age.

Her first memory at this point is when she was somewhere around three or four and the power went out while she was having a bath. Very scary for her at the time.

Our DD was about 11 months old when she visited a relative's house out of state. Her next visit was at least two years later. She stared at a corner of the house, frowning, before finally asking, "Where's the tree?" This created a lot of confusion among everyone until they finally recalled that DD's previous visit had been in December. And sure enough, the corner DD indicated was where they had the Christmas tree.

I don't think she remembers the house anymore.

When DS7 was 18 months or so, we had a book of opposites we read him once in a while. Drawings of a duck and a goose showing up/down, fast/slow, heavy/light, etc. We stopped reading it to him because it seemed to upset him. It went into the "to be donated pile - which we only rarely get around to actually donating.

About a month ago we were sorting the pile, and came across that book. He started paging through it, reading it to me. Then he got to the drawings of "happy/sad" and said, "I never did like that page."

The research about narrative memory, from what I recall, suggests that we re-write our memories through the process of recall, with these early autobiographical memories forming their own stable storyline around the end of latency age (so 10-ish). Younger children appear to recall with less discrimination, whereas older children have formed go-to memories that mark moments in their early childhood.

In general, research on memory in young children is fraught with challenges. A discussion which, in my mind, always leads to the ritual-satanic-child-abuse-in-daycare cases in the 80s. (In case anyone is wondering, pretty much universally found to be products of very poor interviewing technique--and worse--in well-meaning child safety advocates.)

I have no idea what my DS15 youngest memory is but it's not very young. I've tried talking to him about the preschool/daycare he attended and he has very little recall of it. To my surprise he doesn't recall a lot from 6th grade. My husband remembers very little from his youth (before 12 or 13) and I'm wondering if my DS is like this as well. I am sure if one could prove it somehow, that my husband retains a lot of what he learned at that age. Just not things he experienced. In my case i can remember certain moments vividly from the time I was 3, and I from around 5th grade on I remember a lot including details such as how classes were picked, why I took a certain extra-circular, those kids who teased me.

Well, what was it?

I'm stuck with vivid memories of me inflicting physical harm on myself.

Such as "let's climb on top of a wooden rocking chair to get that board game!" (I still have a cute little scar on my forehead to prove that one.)

And "Hey, I'm going to play with that motorcycle that my cousin just got off of and see what happens!". (I definitely recall that this was merely a severe deep second degree burn, since I did not have charred skin, although I had skin discoloration in that area for years and years. And I still cannot figure out how I managed to burn that particular part of my leg on the engine.)

My DD has many interesting tales to tell about her birth and pre-birth experiences. She said that she didn't kick me but she was trying to swim. She also has said that she knew it was time to come out when she felt the temperature was too high for her to be comfortable. I'm sure this is all a product of her imagination but nonetheless, I think they are rather informative.

Her true memories used to go back to 14 months when she was 3. She used to remember her old classmates' names and their parents' names that I have long forgotten but I don't think she remembers much anymore. Well, these days, it seems like she "forgets" everything so she doesn't have to tell me anything.

Interesting discussion. I'm quite confident that DS expressed a true memory because, along Howler Karma's line of reasoning:

A) We have no photos or videos of the play.
B) Because it was such an unexceptional activity, we hadn't talked about it previously. Also, we had packed the toy away in storage around 6 months.
C) DS volunteered a description of feelings of frustration and of feeling trapped in his body, something he has never expressed before, so he had attached an autobiographical narrative to the memory.
D) My father and I have similar early memories around feelings of frustration with a clear visual and emotional memory of the events; my dad at 3-4 months and me at 18 months. As an adult, I'm able to recall that incident in vivid detail.

The basis of our understanding of the brain is in its infancy. I am open to the idea that neurologists don't have a watertight grasp of the full range of the brain's capabilities, though I acknowledge that there are inherent challenges in teasing out true memory from post-hoc imagination in young children.

A selection of my earliest memories:

"Hey, there's Lulus's crunchy dog food. She loves this stuff. She's a great dog, and she wouldn't eat anything icky, so it must be tasty. Think I'll try it. [pause] !!! This is disgusting! How can Lulu eat this stuff?"

(While seated in high chair) "I'm too close to the table. Think I'll just extend my feet and push myself backwards." This was back in the days when high chairs were tall and slender. The results were predictable.

"I love my pink overalls."

"I love spaghetti-os."

Val, along the lines of your dog food eating, I remember a shopping trip with my mum when I was a toddler. I ducked into a clothing rack to surprise her and found the back fastener of an anti-theft dye device on the floor. It was round, bright blue, and about half an inch in diameter, so naturally a Smartie. It flew out of my mouth as quickly as it went in.

"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!! 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?" 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.

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.)

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.

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....

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

Need to ask my kids what they can remember.

I remember a specific playground at a specific drop in day care in flashes because that is where we were dropped off when my mom went to have my baby sister. I was 4 and it was a one time very novel event but I guess it made an impression on me. It was a very fancy playground.

I also remember my normal preschool and one specific singing time learning the song eidel vies or more accurately I was ignoring the teacher and my best childhood girlfriend was teaching me to tie my shoes.

#1 remembers being in the hospital immediately after the birth of #2, which would be age 2-9.

Apparently acquiring new siblings leaves a deep impression on children.

My memory of childhood is quite poor, but I do remember falling backwards out of my highchair (it was a weird old wooden one) at age 2 or so onto the hard wooden floor. I think I actually may have had a mild concussion, because I seem to remember waking up, with my mother screaming. I like to claim that this is when the math was knocked out of my brain.