Mine -- in a portable babypen with my twin -- bright blue sky, briliant sunshine, next to a lake!

Your mom.

I started early.

Oh, Eideteker, grow up already.

Mine is walking out into a blazing, white-hot heat, rounding the corner of the house, and coming across my dad welding something in the driveway. I'd been told many, many times not to look directly at the flame, but this time it caught me by surprise. I looked at it. And felt really, really guilty. I ran crying back to the door and knocked until my mom let me in.

It was very stressful.

not screaming.

Poor little pups. :-(

It's not my earliest memory, but I do remember being very young, maybe four or five, and watching my dad go up to the counter to get our food at McDonalds and thinking, "You must remember this. It's little things like this that you'll forget."

Squeezing a packet of mustard until it exploded onto the back of a rocking chair. I was about four.

LOL, jrossi. That's dedication.

I have several from when I was about 3, but I don't know which is oldest. And I don't know if they're not more made up by me remembering them than actually being accurate. I remember jumping on a couch and falling and cutting my head on the coffee table. I remember having a surgery that everyone else has forgotten I had. I remember getting wax paper from my aunt because she said that me and my cousin would go faster down the slide. I remember that we didn't.

i remember probably answering this here before about putting on shoes and wandering around the building in the middle of the night.

I was an odd child.

In the dark, eth? Weren't you scared?

I would totally think the wax paper would work. Unless it was a plastic slide.

Oh, Eideteker, grow up already.

Okay. My earliest memory is being in church with my parents. One of them was holding me as they went up to receive communion. I remember the priest reaching out with the wafer, and it going over my head. I'm 90% sure I was 2 at the time. I remember it being earlier than the memory I have of being in the hospital when my brother was being born (I was 3 by then).

i swear i wrote it here already.
i'm just incapable of finding it.

Going into the basement during a tornado warning.

I remember going to the hospital to see my newborn baby brother. I was 2 years and 3 months old.

He was in a special section of the hospital that we couldn't enter (due to birth defects) and we had to look through an outside window.

One of my earliest memories was apparently the first day I started reading, just a bit before two years old. I was in a grocery store parking lot with my mom, and I looked up at the sign and suddenly the big red shapes made "sense". So I pointed and said "Vons!", which just about floored my mom. I remember her gasping and going "ohmigosh... ohmigosh!"

Then when we were inside and I was getting pushed around in the shopping cart seat, at some point I had grabbed or was given one of those "Golden Books" and just started happily reading away. It was like magic - I distinctly remember how it felt when all the squiggles and blobs suddenly became "words" with "meaning" - very satisfying and important. The text in the book seemed like it crawled around on the page until it "set" into concrete shapes, and then it just made sense.

I don't ever remember forming phonic components. I don't ever remember "knowing" or "memorizing" the alphabet - and to this day I (sometimes) still have to "sing" the English alphabet in my head to remember the proper order, and woe be upon ye if you ask me to recite it backwards. I remember whole words just suddenly became symbols with meaning.

I don't remember which Golden Book it was, but there were animals and all that kids book stuff, and I remember being annoyed by the simplicity of the plot and just generally confused by the concept of talking animals and frustrated with the whole dichotomy between real life and this goofy book. To this day I feel an inexplicable and strange mixture of annoyance, mistrust and frustration when I see an old-school gold-foiled Golden Books title.

So.

Apparently a barely-toddling toddler reading a book in a grocery store ranked pretty high on the freak-o-meter. It was like I'd grown two heads and was hovering six feet in the air while talking about aliens in Sanskrit or something.

"No. Way. No way can that kid read. You're just making him hold the book to show off." someone said.

My mom said something along the lines of "No, it's not me. He just... started reading. A few minutes ago."

"No way. Impossible."

At which I started reading aloud from the book. I remember that the small crowd of 4 or 5 people we were standing in line with gasped aloud, making that whispering, tittering noise small crowds do. I remember being embarassed at first, like I was doing something wrong, and then immediately being annoyed that they were even judgine me or being nosy in the first place. (Granted, I wouldn't have had the words to express this, then, but in hindsight I can assign words to remembered emotions)

All of which pretty much set the stage for the next 14-16 years of my life as a nerd, a freak and an outcast. I can't remember how many times I got my ass kicked at school 'cause I was reading during recess, before I learned to (marginally) kick ass to defend myself.

But in hindsight I wouldn't change a thing, of course, 'cause I know for sure I'm really not that unusual, and certainly not alone.

I was three years old. My parents' dog, John, was a lovable mutt they'd had since before they were married. He was dying on the floor of the kitchen on some newspaper my parents had laid down, as they'd elected not to have him put down by the vet.

I think it was at some point just after he'd actually died -- I asked my mom if I could pet him, and she said yes. So I knelt down and petted him a few times.

I also remember watching my dad dig John's grave in the woods in front of the house a short while later. Once the hole was deep enough, they carried him out and placed him in it, along with a particular blanket that he'd liked.

My dad still lives in the same spot. Occasionally, I go look at the white rock they used as a marker.

:( killdevil.

I was pretty teeny - not even 2, I don't think. The family was going to look at the new house under construction. Mom was carrying me across the boards spanning the still open to dirt underneath front stoop. I remember thinking, what's that hole? but I wasn't scared, just curious.

I had to have been less than two because we were still living in California. I grabbed the back of a ladder-back chair, pulled myself up and took a step. I had trouble keeping my balance and started to holler. My mom and Mrs. Kilgore, the neighbor, were having coffee. Then I freaked out and the hypnotist snapped me out of my memory of my first steps. It was very weird. Clear as a bell.

I was around 2, and my mum, me, and my aunt and uncle went to an A&P (agricultural and pastoral) show. I remember looking at the cows and then my uncle bought me a rabbit skin.

It's a strong memory because the rabbit skin was so soft and I spent the rest of the day stroking it. I slept with it beside my head on my pillow till I wore through the fur.

I was about a year and a half, on a trip in Nova Scotia, visiting a great-uncle who died after this trip. I remember standing with my mom and great-aunt and great-uncle, and him asking me if I wanted to go strawberry picking with him and me being shy but saying yes, and I remember having to reach up to hold his hand. My mom doesn't believe that I remember this, says I was too young.

At two, I remember being at my uncle's wedding. My cousin, who was 3 at the time, came up with the BRILLIANT idea of sneaking over during the speeches (?) and sampling the icing on the as-yet-uncut wedding cake. I remember feeling sneaky. :) Of course, they did happen to notice little finger marks on the edges of their cake when they went to cut it, but we were cute enough that we didn't get in trouble.

I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I was standing in my crib, holding the bars. Sunbeams were streaming in through the window (might have been morning or an afternoon nap), and I remember trying to grab and hold the dust particles suspended in the light.

Skating with my father. (How Canadian!) I was wearing bob skates over my boots and watching the other kids ride GT Snowracers, of which I was deeply jealous—they had steering wheels! My father had run into a colleague from work and was talking to her, and since I wasn't allowed to go very far from him, it was cutting into my free-skating time.

I was about one-and-a-half. My earliest memory is envy and irritation. Go figure.

Maybe 2 yo or so. Running around in the concrete/astroturf "park" shared by several skyrise apartments in HK. The servant was watching me as ran around behind the cinderblock walls, corners rounded by the successive layers of industrial paint.

Walking down a street in the Bahamas. I was about 2 1/2 or 3 and the street was striped by shadows: dark, light, dark, light. I remember watching the street, my shadow, my mom's shadow, wondering why you couldn't feel the difference between the dark and the light and trying to feel it, just looking at the colors and watching how they all changed in the shadow and the light: even the leaves on the trees were different colors depending on the light. Blew my small mind. I have another memory from that trip - we were going to some place called Pink Sands and I was really excited about the pink sand. But when we got there I cried, because the sand wasn't really pink, it was just like normal sand only maybe a little more beige. I thought it was going to be hot pink and I was so disappointed by the banal reality.