what's the earliest thing you can remember (for certain)?

I also remember looking at a little pom-pom toy bug thing stuck on the door of my room when I was two, but I'm not very certain about this, I might just think I remember it because my parents used to talk about it all the time (my first word was "bug" and I said it while pointing to this thing).

I didn't grow up with videotape (after my time) or home movies, I wonder if kids who did have stronger memory reinforcement of things that happened when they were very small.

Earlier memories that I can't pin down as easily:

Our next-door neighbour visiting the house, just after her husband had died, to give us the things of his that she wanted us to have.

Being shown how to type programs into our first computer (a Sinclair ZX81), by my dad.

Telling a TV repair man to hurry up because there was something on TV that afternoon that I wanted to watch.

Asking my mum why the sky was blue (it was at night - I *really* wanted to know why it was light blue in the daytime and dark blue at night, but that might not have been what I heard) and being told that it was because it reflected the sea. My mum swears this never happened, though.

Playing with my mum's three-foot-high toy koala bear in her bedroom.

(all of these memories are definitely earlier than Christmas 1981, because they were in the house that we moved out of just afterwards).

The only memory I have of my maternal grandmother that's definitely of her and not of a picture of her is from the Christmas before she died; I know it's a genuine memory because we don't have any photos at all of her in her final months, when she was confined to a wheelchair (she had motor neurone disease, eventually dying of a secondary infection of her lungs). I can't remember anything substantial or detailed about her appearance, just the feeling around her: elderly, ill, paralysed, unable to speak properly.

Pushing the screen out of our front window, taking canned goods (and a jar of mayonnaise) out of a low kitchen cabinet and throwing them out onto the front lawn. Late '67 or early '68.

But I do remember LOTS of things from the age of maybe 3, perhaps 2 1/2. We moved houses when i was four, last year I tried drawing all the rooms and floors and could do it almost perfectly, after 22 years.

a) Meeting a girl at the playground across the street from our apartment and then going back to her place (that's right) to see her Barbie Ice Cream Maker. (I don't recall my parents being around anywhere, but surely they must have been?)

b) Walking into preschool with my friend Jay while imitating various animals

The first one is the one I usually cite when asked this question, because it's a more private memory than the second one, which my dad remembers (he was the one dropping us off at school) and has brought up on occasion.

The first thing i remember is I had just woken up from a reoccuring nightmare about a giant clock that had deafening tics. I was laying in bed and seeing my dad walk into his room outside the doorway, then seeing him walk in again.

I thought this was really strange and got up and started walking down the hallway and i felt like my body was freezing up like a robot, all the joints stiffened and it was the exact opposite of an out-of-body experience, like i was trapped in this machine. I kept liking it to being built into a small red wooden chair for some reason and this has remained in my mind ever since.

Oh, and I was anywhere from 18 months - 2 years old at this time.

I have vague memories of being nine months old and being carried by my mother while waiting to have my picture taken at (get this) another Sears and not enjoying the experience at all (but, odddly enough, I don't think I cried once throughout the picture-taking experience), but, once again, these are vague memories and I can't picture this episode clearly. Like, I know what I was wearing when I got lost at the big Sears, but not during this picture-taking moment.

(Oh! And I still remember what I was thinking when I got baptised, but that's the only memory I still have of that event.)

me too! im very glad we're both still alive

I was wearing a red tartan dress with a cream pinafore thing over it, and one of my presents was a set of 'tennis' bats and a foam ball. The foam ball was hit over the garden wall during my party, and I clearly remember feeling cross and also guilty.