This paper emerges from a view that the growing body of self-reflective qualitative research designs elsewhere in education is insufficiently represented in early childhood enquiry. Research of this sort has a rich capacity to inform critical understanding with experiential data that reveal the remarkable within the quotidian; more specifically, it has the potential to give some access to the "small secret stuff" of childhood that--though often observed in literary work--is frequently obscured in social science report. Our own experiences--not least of the world of children from which we are all graduates--are no less overshadowed in most of our critical accounts. In this paper the exploration of my own childhood provides a ground for an autoethnographic enquiry realised through nine short stories. The paper first describes the visual/sensory ethnographic process, which gave life to the accounts before presenting the stories themselves. It then argues the usefulness of reflexivity and autoethnography in early childhood education research, and a conclusion urges further reflective enquiry from the early childhood education community. (Contains 5 figures.)