"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.
