The earliest memory I know is genuine is feeding a goat at the Dogpatch petting zoo and being disappointed that I couldn't have any of the stuff that came in a vaguely ice cream cone-like serving cup. I was two. I also remember paddle boats from that trip, but not trying to lunge out of one and having Mom keep me from falling in the water at the last second (which is how she lost her diamond engagement ring).

I have some other fragmented memories from age 2 to 3 but they've been reinforced by hearing tapes my parents made of me over the years. Things kind of come into focus at four, when I stayed with my mom's sister during the day and have a lot of memories of her (she died that year), her kids, and the children my age in that neighborhood.

My earliest memories are from 3 1/2 when I decided to go look at the house we were moving to instead of staying in the backyard playing.

I totally missed the house, of course, and ended up quite far away. A policeman noticed me and went to talk to me, and I ran away from him. Unsurprisingly, this was not successful (my report to my mother was "I runned and runned, but he was too fast"). They drove me home, where my father answered the door. Then I got spanked.

The two parts I remember myself, instead of as a story, are an old man at the pond asking where my mother was, and my father's face when he answered the door. It's weird being able to remember my father when he was 23. He was just a kid!

My earliest memories are, first, riding a box-shaped four-wheeler toy down the path near our house and stopping to watch an ant nest; and waking up from having my tonsils out and finding them in a jar on the bedside table. Oh, and getting a vaccination and crying. I've never really had a problem with needels since then.

I had this toy that made a mooing sound when you flipped it over. It was one of my favorite toys.

I had one of those! I remember once when I was two or three playing with it to try and scare my father into running away and never coming back. He'd just spilled hot coffee on me while he was screaming at my mom, and she was frantically bandaging my leg while he stood in the doorway and watched. It's funny that I remember that toy specifically because of that. Most of my earliest memories involve my father yelling, or breaking something, or throwing something at one of us. Whenever some sweet naive person widens their eyes at me and says, "But you must love him, he's your dad!" I just laugh. Pretty sure my memories of my first four years (when we lived with him) aren't molded by anyone, because no one ever talked about him.

Every time someone says the word "arrest" I always get a brief flash of a policeman giving someone CPR on a teevee show that I must have seen when I was a child, like Chips or something. It must have been the first time I heard the word Cardiac arrest, and what with the policemen involved, I was very confused. But I always have that little memory flash up.

Ha! You know the line in Silent Night, "'round yon virgin tender and mild"? As a child I associated that with a cigarette ad ("a mild smoke"), so in my mind whenever I hear Silent Night the Virgin Mary is smoking. ... Well, my mom smoked and she was named Mary, too, so why not?

My memories are pretty detailed going back to about 4 y.o., but it's definitely aided by moving so much in the Air Force so I can date stamp them by the places we lived.

My earliest memory is about age 2, of getting on my belly to slide out of our white station wagon. Which we only had until I was that age.

But we lived in Oregon, Canada and Florida, then four different houses in Florida so all those memories are discretely boxed off by location, and school.

I really need to get Hubby's memories written down. He'll drop references to things into conversation, then I have to dig the story out of him. Like the (minor) tidal wave that nearly washed him out to sea in Hawaii and working on tall ships and such.

it's definitely aided by moving so much in the Air Force so I can date stamp them by the places we lived.

Yeah, DH has much more accurate memories of his childhood than I do mine, because he can date them by what country they were in at the time.

I totally missed the house, of course, and ended up quite far away.

When my uncle was two, he decided to follow his daddy to work one morning, and traipsed out of the house in his pjs at 6:00 am. Grandma had no clue he was gone until she went to wake him a few hours later, and obviously went into panic mode when she realized he was gone. After running around the farm looking for him for nearly an hour, she called the police, to find out that Gordon was there. A policeman had picked him up nearly a mile away from their house. Someone took a picture of him in his pjs wearing a policeman's hat, sitting on someone's desk, and it got published in the local paper later that week. When I asked him what he remembers about that day, he's not sure if his memories are real or stem from the article and Grandma's stories.

I don't think I'd be able to file memories if I didn't have different houses and countries as backdrops.

Hmm. I have an agenda in my inbox for a meeting that's not on my calendar. I better track that down before I embarrass myself.

Yeah, growing up in the house your father lived in as a kid doesn't give you a lot of variant to track events by.