• I remember breastfeeding, learning to crawl and walk

    No way.

    Howwww.

    My earliest memory was something… I think was when I was like 3, I remember seeing photos dated 2005… (probably still in some drawers somewhere) so I was visiting Hong Kong from Guangzhou…

    I think we went there to vacation(?) + meet with relatives from abroad in the US

    I really only remember

    1. cable cars
    2. the hotel room that you need a special card thing to access and turn on the electricity in the room (I think it must’ve been some rfid thing)
    3. Double-deck buses
    4. Trolleys(?)

    That’s about it

    I remember it kinda feel “western”? (I mean of course it felt western after 99 years of british rule lol)

    I think I already knew how to say basic words in Cantonese at this point so I remember asking a question about the weird rfid hotel card thing…

    But like… nah how the f do you remember breastfeeding and being a toddler?

    I have zero memories of pre-speaking age of myself.

    I guess having a language make it easier to form memories? Or maybe vice versa? Being able to form memories make it possible to retain a language? Idk.

    • Horsecook@sh.itjust.works
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      1 hour ago

      I just never forgot.

      I have lots of memories from when I was a baby, a toddler. Mundane things, like sitting in a high chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice from a sippy cup, playing with my toys, crawling around the house. More impactful ones, like when my parents were trying to get me to walk, which I didn’t want to do, but couldn’t argue yet, so I kept attempting to show them that walking was foolish because I could crawl much faster. My first word, “trash,” which I picked up from watching my mother sort the mail, and initially thought applied to everything made of paper. How I figured out how to escape my drop-side crib, and would wander around the house at night while my parents slept. When my mother came home from the hospital with my younger sister and I first held her, and promptly dropped her, when I was just shy of 2. How jealous I was that my mother weaned me because of the new baby. Teaching my sister how to escape the crib, so she could play with me at night. Being angry that she wasn’t careful like me, and got caught escaping the crib. My first day of pre-school, which I desperately did not want to attend. Starting a fight in pre-school, I beat a boy with a wicker basket because he tried to play with the building blocks I was using.

      You don’t need language to think, or form memories. Small children often are able to remember and recount these sorts of things, they just forget them as they age.

      • Horsecook@sh.itjust.works
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        28 minutes ago

        Oh, I just recalled a good one. A memory of a word from before I could speak.

        My mother had gestational diabetes, and I was born a very large and fat baby. For the first few months of my life, my parents called me “Baby Huey,” a reference to a 1950s cartoon character. They stopped calling me that long before I could speak, and then forgot they ever had.

        I brought this up later in my childhood, because I wanted to know what a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, the only Huey I knew about then, had to do with baby me.