Things tended to seem grander, bigger, and better as a child. Maybe it's because children are actually smaller than adults, and therefore everything seems bigger because it...well...is. But I think there's more to it than that. Our minds as children are so prone to exaggeration, which I think is linked to the imaginations children possess. I remember my brother telling a story of running from a bumblebee that was as big as his head. He would argue vehemently against anyone who tried to reason with him that it is rare (if not absolutely impossible) for a bumblebee to be that size. But he was convinced it was. In his memory, that bumblebee was the size of his head, whether in reality it was or not. It was his reality. And therefore, I maintain that a child's imaginings and memories are, to them, real. It is not until children grow up and their wild imaginations are tamed (become dormant? morph into something else completely?cease to exist? who knows) that they get a better grasp on "reality."
For example, in Nobokov's experience, his family's coat of arms appeared to be different to his childhood self than his adult self:
"Thus, in the first version of this chapter, when describing the Nabokov's coat of arms (carelessly glimpsed among some familial trivia many years before), I somehow managed to twist it into the fireside wonder of two bears posing with a great chessboard propped up between them. I have now looked it up, that blazon, and am disappointed to find that it boils down to a couple of lions--brownish and, perhaps, overshaggy beasts, but not really ursine--licking their chops, rampant, regardant, arrogantly demonstrating the unfortunate knight's shield, which is only one sixteenth of a checkerboard, of alternate tinctures, azure & gules, with a botoneé cross, argent, in each rectangle" (51).
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