Earliest memories

In one of my classes we've been talking a bunch about memories and memory formation so I've been trying to come up with some.

I've actually considered myself, for a long time to be someone with a bad memory. I've had significant, even impressive things happen to me in life and I usually don't remember them. Usually someone in the family reminds me and I say "oh yeah, did that happen to me." I'm trying to think of a good example but I can't think of one right now.

So in church today I thought of an early memory and I'm going to need to ask mom to figure out if it is actually early or not. I think it is from when my folks were managing apartments over in Aloha. My mom was making quilted blankets for Audrey and I, maybe Marcene. She had the blankets laid out and she had given us each a pile of pennies and we were supposed to mark on the blankets where we wanted the ties put.

So in my research class my proff did a qualitative study a while back where she surveyed a group of older people from a small town in Wisconsin in order to get their oldest memories. She shared those with us and had us fit the different memories into basic categories. Some we came up with included seasons, family, unusual events. One guy's earliest memory involved fishing with his older brother and falling off the bridge into the creek. In fact a large number of the memories seemed linked to odd things that wouldn't just happen everyday.

I feel the opposite in my memories, I feel they are mostly boring, and hardly worth mentioning. Some I worry are actually dreams I had after the fact, or are stories that I heard about myself, that I have visualized.

I remember being in kindergarten admiring the amazing paper mache triceratops the first graders made. I remember swallowing a bug on a windy day, I remember Audrey on the back step painting her legs with pink fingernail polish, I remember grandma Miller giving me a cracker in our living room at Schiller. I also remember climbing up the back steps at Schiller. I remember not getting off the bus my first day of school and hiding in the very back row, worried the bus driver would be angry. I remember when the bus driver finally say me and asked "what are you doing back there?" I remember riding my tricycle at the Aloha apartments, and I remember watching nickelodeon while pulling out my hair.

But I don't know if that's a normal amount of memories or not. Before the age of two there's basically no way your brain is developed to the point that it can really create memories, then from age two til five you're considered to be in the window of childhood amnesia. The average for first memories falls around 3 years 6months. It would be interesting to look up timeline wise to know where we were all living at 3 years 6months and see if we have memories that correlate.

I sometimes think were not making any memories at age 1 and younger cause we're still in the process of forgetting the pre-existence. Really I just tell myself that because I like to believe that the newborns I work with remember stuff like that.