I recall one time when I was around 2 years old and my parents took me to Pizza Hut. When asked about toppings and hearing that we could have three, I said I wanted extra extra extra cheese. They thought I was being cute. However, I had no concept of cuteness or how to be it. I simply wanted all 3 toppings to be extra cheese and to my disappointment, 2 of the toppings were not. At the time, I had not known how to say 3 toppings of extra cheese and I thought repeating extra three times would communicate what I wanted.
That said, I stopped playing my memory recall game around age 5 when I began to be bullied and did not want to remember the past anymore. That left me with far fewer memories from early grade school than I had from prior years. It also let many of my early memories fade, although not enough for me to forget them entirely.
My memory isn't as good as yours, but you just reminded me of this fairly distinct feeling. As a child you're being earnest; only as an adult do you see that as being cute.