What is your earliest memory?

I have vague memories of sitting in a high chair and my mother feeding me breakfast, i had to have been around 3 years old. 

Falling on a low brick wall and cutting my head while I was walking home from school. I was five.

Getting my first dog when I was 10. Cheers!

I remember listening to 'Kindergarden on the Air'  many times after my older brother started school.

 

  I’m the third-born of five (surviving) siblings, my eldest sister is the first-born and then my mother had three sons all born thirteen months apart almost to the week. My elder brother was born on the 26th of the month, I was born on the 21st of the next month but one year later, and my younger brother was born on the 25th of the next month but one year after I was born. As such, we were all three close enough in age that we grew up in close levels of social dynamics and development.

  One of my earliest memories* is the home we lived in when I was about two and a half or three.  My younger brother was old enough that he was with the rest of us chasing each other around in the front yard, laughing and screaming like kids do. There were about seven or eight of us total, including some neighbor children. The yard itself was flat and roomy for us to play in, but it gave way to a hill that dropped down toward the street and seemed as steep as Mount Everest to us, and we were afraid to get too close to the edge lest we roll down it and fall off the edge of the earth’s surface.

  I remember the house was painted white, and it was either a triplex or quadriplex or row of one-story apartments, because the façade was a row of front doors, and there were no spaces between the houses. We did not live in one of the end houses, our door was either in the middle of three or another inner door.

  It must have been fall or early winter, because even though we were are having a lot of fun, I remember the wind suddenly picking up as a big gust hit us. I remember shivering and wondering why I got so cold all of a sudden. I saw the tree branches and bushes moving as the wind took them, the scattered leaves taking flight, and all I wanted to do was go inside the house. I didn’t really understand weather yet, so I didn’t know the cool breeze of late afternoon or early evening was the reason for my chills. 

  My mother’s rule was “in or out”; if we were going to play outside, we had to stay outside, if we went inside, we’d have to stay inside, no running back and forth in and out of the house. Also, it was “all or none”. If one of us went in, we all had to go in.  I was cold and wanted to go inside, but that meant no running, no chasing, no loud voices, no throwing of anything, we’d have to sit down somewhere and be quiet and worse: stay still. I didn’t want to be the one who caused us all to go inside, so I kept my mouth shut and kept running around, even though I was cold.

  My mother told me years later that we only lived in that house for about a year.

  Fast forward about sixteen years after my blustery day.  I had just graduated Marine Corps boot camp and was back home on leave before reporting to my permanent base. I had a lot of free time on my hands, and one thing I did was to visit that old neighborhood and to see the house from my toddler days. I had never been back there since that time. The building itself looked tinier than I had remembered, but Mount Everest looked about as intimidating as a pitcher’s mound on a baseball diamond.



*I have a lot of memories of when my family lived in that house, but I don’t know their chronology. This story above is one of my many vivid memories of that time, perhaps the most vivid one, but it may or may not be precisely the earliest, merely because I don’t know their order.
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I remember my parents holding my baby brother after they came home from the hospital with him.  I was two years old.  I also remember my parents coming into my room at night to take me to the cellar with them during a storm.  There was a lot of lightning and the clouds looked like fingers moving in different directions.  I have another early memory of sitting by the Christmas tree.

I still remember going thru the birth canal. 

I remember staying with my aunt and uncle when my oldest brother was born. I was 18 months old at the time.  My strongest memory is of walking out the back door on the shoveled sidewalk and the piles of snow were so high it was like walking in a tunnel (at least to an 18 month-old). The other memory is driving past my grandmother's house and waving to my older sisters who were staying with her while Mom was in the hospital.

Sitting in a playpen beside the shed as my mom hung up clothes on the clothesline.  (i was around 18 months)

I was born and raised in an incubator for three months, and, when they took me out of it, I recall a nurse carrying me over to stark white cabinets and pulling out a bright white towel to wrap me up in. This, I declare,
is my earliest memory and was only 3 months old. Photo of me. At 1 month.
This post was edited by CosmicWunderkind at June 24, 2021 10:56 AM MDT

I remember my Dad sitting in a rocking chair whistling.  I think I was 3.