posted
I'd take the books. I can't cook either, so what I eat now is basically nutrition deficient gruel. Nutritious gruel would be a step up.
Posts: 1080 | Registered: Apr 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Sean Monahan: Wow, Noemon! If you can really remember back to age 1.5, that's impressive. My earliest memory is at age three, and it's only a memory of a few seconds.
My early memories are really spotty, but I can remember bits and pieces from back then. My earliest memory is of being in my crib, watching my brother and my mom put up loony tune posterboard cutouts up on the walls. My mother told my brother not to put a Yosimite Sam to close to the crib, as I'd tear it. I tried to say that I wouldn't do that, but I couldn't speak yet, and it just came as as a babble. I was so frustrated and angry at not being able to talk that I started crying. My mom thinks that I was probably about 9 months old when she got those cutouts. I'm aware that it isn't considered possible for kids that age to form memories, but unless that and all of my other really early memories (being scared of the way my cradle rocked, being fascinated by the eyehook that I could see but couldn't reach on the cradle, being lonely when put down for a nap in my crib, trying to decide whether it was better to scoot or crawl, that sort of thing) are false, the people who believe that are wrong. Or I'm some kind of mutant. But I figure they're probably just wrong.
I think you are highly unusual in this regard. Most people have few if any memories of a time before they learned to speak which isn't to say that you don't have this memories.
I have some clear memories from when I was about 1 1/2. I remember very distinctly the first Sunday school class I attended and that I wasn't allowed to go until I was 18 months old. I also remember numerous things about the apartment where we lived, climbing into my crib to take naps, things my mother told me. I remember going to my great grandmothers funeral which was prior to my second birth day and my father lifting me up to see into her coffin and my asking him why she didn't open her eyes. But I was speaking in complete sentences by the time I was 1 1/2 and I don't have any clear memories of a time before I could talk.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Oh, I suppose I should add that I do remember learning how to read but the only preconception I remember having about it was that if I learned to read, I wouldn't have to rely on my mother or father to read to me. I can't remember I time when I wasn't read to.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I was always read-to as well. My mother said it was the one time we would all 4 sit still, when she was reading to us. I remember my little brother learning to read. He would look at magazines and just NEED to know what the captions said about the pictures he was seeing. I remember him asking mom to read things to him, and calling out "what does B-E-L-O-N-G spell" etc. He was highly motivated to read, cause it drove him nuts to be the only person in our family who couldn't read.
I don't remember having that process myself. I think I learned to read much younger than he did. I just absorbed it from my older siblings, reading their hand-me-down books, I think. I was probably around 4.
I do remember soon after I could read, thinking it was so much fun that I read every road sign and business sign out loud in the car whenever we went out. I remember my mom asking me to please stop. Apparently that got annoying after a bit.
I come from a family of readaholics, and I always loved reading from the very first. My family went to the big library downtown every Sunday, then stopped on the way back and got ice cream cones. It was a family ritual, and we could check out as many books as we liked. Also, mom let us buy as many of those Arrow books, the paperbacks they sold to kids through a catalog passed around in school, as we wanted. That was fun.
Reading for us was always a fun thing, never something we were supposed to do. It was a great delight, like candy or ice cream, and not like spinach. I think that's part of the attraction for us. It was always "put down that book and do your chores" or "put the book away and turn out the light, it's bedtime now." Never "read this cause it's good for you to read." I think teachers can kill anything by making it something you have to do instead of something you want to do. Don't you?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Thanks, Shmuel. I couldn't remember whether it was dragon or dinosaur, and figured I'd go with it. =D
I can read pretty fast. I read a 400 page book cover to cover today. In a year, I could still probably tell you most of its plot, but the details all fall out of my brain for the most part. That's part of why I own so many books. I forget enough that they're fun to reread. Sometimes, if I really like a book, I will read it twice in a row. I like sharing books with people because their reading the book will usually make me want to reread it myself or remind me of some of the things I'd forgotten.
I think it's funny that a lot of the time when my boyfriend and I go out to eat, we will each take a book and read. Sometimes I catch people looking at us with strange expressions, something like pity as though we were announcing in public that we can't stand each other. Only one person who ever waited on us commented on it positively. He said something like, "I can see this is the table of avid readers!"
Posts: 1751 | Registered: Jun 1999
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Apparently that got annoying after a bit.
