For my part, there are several items that pop up. My cousin Tony and I bury the remote control at Grandma's house. The most interesting aspect of this story, that members of my family still don't realize, is that I played a far greater role in the burying than I let on at the time (I was 8), and the relative harsh punishment on Tony (who was thought to be the chief culprit) and shaking of the head and saying "dissapointed in you" at me (who was thought to be basically going along with my corrupt cousin)... the frog story came up last time I saw my parents. As is, my mother and I had our own sides of the story -- which were not mutually exclusive, necessarily, but emphasized different parts. (I remember being distressed that the frog was being let go, mom remembers being distressed by the hopping-frog in her room.)
The story of my first four words is seemingly exaggerated for effect. (So I had a four-word vocabulary at one time? -- by definition, so do most kids... "shoe", "dog", "cup", and "more cup" aren't [i]that[/i] weird.)
A section of an autobiographical piece I wrote for a college professor where I tell of the events in annoying my speech therapist, whose job it was to get me talking, by not saying a word prompted the response "I don't believe you -- speech therapists don't usually do this." This is part of another family - "Justin" legend: shutting up and frustrating her to no end, driving her nuts, and supposedly patiently playing my cards until one day when I rambled on and on and on -- driving her nuts yet again. (I prefer to think I was rather naive and unaware of the consternation I was causing her.)
The "I can count to 5" school-bus waiting story. Alex says proudly, "I can count to 5", and counts to five. I say, "I can count to 500", and start counting to 900-something. Alex then orders us off his property. As an 8th grade English assignment, it was a favourite of my 8th grade peers. I recall Mr. Hayes, right before reading it, saying "Okay, this one is a little different" (pause) "Actually, this one is a lot different."
The stories have a central driving force, and generally center around childhood because at that time the driving and prime relationship is defined by family, the parents have a chief emotional stake in what occurs with their children, and the siblings have a unique vantage point. So, there are a potential of 3 (or 4 if witnessed by 2 different age-brackets with the siblings) unique perspectives of different levels of authority.
With the frog story, and other stories I'm not the final authority of events. I remember some of them, I have insights into some of them that family members have missed, I don't remember some of them, my side of the story is suspect to selected memory, etc.
In the case of the "eating Ice Cream cone from the bottom up" story -- I do remember it. More importantly, I remember the precise logic and motivation of why I would do such a thing to a degree that gives more meaning to my side of the story which everyone else misses completely.
If one were to look and observe closely how I ate ice cream cones at an early age, what they would find is a dogged, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive attempt at leaving as much ice cream as late as possible and leaving as little cone to eat toward the end. So, I sort of played this objective by ear in eating the ice cream cones. As a general rule, what I would do would be to first nibble at the edges at the top right up to the first indentation. Then, to keep the ice cream from falling off, I would have to hurry up and bite/lick at the overflowing (overflow caused because the first indenation was gone), partially falling ice cream right to the point where it was safely tucked into the cone. Then, I could go back to nibbling the cone... until the ice cream threatened to fall off from the top again, at which point I would have to go back to eating some ice cream from off the top.
The process went like that. What I would eventually end up with is the bottom rung of the cone with melted ice cream in the "pie-hole sections". Here, I would eat off each wall of each section and try to keep the ice cream for as late as possible in each specific section, and eventually have to each the ice cream before the ice cream would fall out. This went for all 6 or 8 "pie-hole sections". In the end, the very last thing I would have to eat from the ice cream cone would be, right after some melted ice cream, a small piece of one of these "pie-hole sections" part of the cones.
I continually experimented and plowed through my mind ways that this could not end up being the case -- ways I could end up with ice cream as the last item of the ice cream cone that I would eat, and not the cone. So, logically, I went full-fledged with the radical attempt at eating the ice cream cone from the bottom up. This had disasterous consequences, but was an inevitable step in my experiments of object-based-ice cream cone eating.
Of course, things might have been adverted had my parents bought for me not soft-cream ice cream cones but hard-frozen ice cream cones, which wouldn't have melted so quickly. But, apparently they were oblivious to my ice-cream cone eating struggles.