my first awareness with spanking
 

when i was about eight yrs old my girl friend and i were playing house like most little girls do, when outside we heard some weird noises. we looked out her parent's bedroom window and saw the neighbor spanking her children in the backyard.
my girlfriend and i decided we should use spanking in our play. first she was the mom and spanked me (i was never spanked by my parents) then later i spanked her but liked being spanked better. we used spanking in our play for several years after that, including in a semi-public situation.
we went to the mall to the movies and would spank in the bathroom for smoking when we were about twelve. i never said anything to anyone about how she and i would spank each other, until much later. when i got married at age nineteen another girlfriend introduced me to a newspaper called spanking times and i knew from the moment i read the first story i was hooked since i was a little kid and didn't understand it then.

My experience was remarkably similar to dstsspirit's. My three cousins and I would also play "house" or "family" in the same manner, and they actually had a playhouse in their backyard. My boy cousin was the oldest and was always the dad (and he made the rules for our games) so I and my two girl cousins got all the spankings! They weren't very hard and I quickly came to enjoy them, to the point that I would play the bratty little kid just to justify them! I viewed them as attention and a show of his affection for me.