I'll have to dig around at my parents to see if I have any lingering childhood pics. Dad loves cameras, but film was expensive when I was young too. I don't remember my first foray into the medieval except from the story my dad likes to tell. He's a volunteer firefighter, and when I was 3 or 4, he was watching me and he had to respond to a call; so he called another volunteer up the street, who brought his younger brother (12? 14?) down to babysit me so they could go to the fire. Dad had an Atari. So the babysitter got wrapped up in that, while I apparently took the couch cushions to build a castle. Castles need cement, right? I somehow got my hands on baby powder, and had dumped the whole bottle on the cushions to hold my "castle" together. Then dad got back, said something (probably "colorful"), and *then* the babysitter realized what I did.
Myself and a friend used to do the wooden sword battles too, and got our start with "armor" out of some discarded carpet and duct tape. That, however, was short-lived. We started on "ninja missions", dressing in all black, and sneaking around our yards at night. Soon, my dad would take me to the MD Renn Fest, where I bought my first legitimate steel sword (blunted for stage combat). And so it truly began - a couple years later, I'd get my first "real" start of armor; 16 gauge mild steel. It was full arms, pauldrons, full legs, and a cuirass, by a company long since out of business. I later lost the cuirass to damage in a small flood in my parents basement (failed sump pump), but the arms and legs were saved after a decent amount of rust removal.
That's awesome that you had heraldry as a kid. I never had anything like that, but I'm the only one in my family with any medieval interests. If I'm lucky enough to have kids, they will go straight from birth to their first mail haubergeon.
Okay, not really, but I will highly encourage them to take interest in chivalry and the medieval period.
