Shares how two future NFL stars kept her on her toes
Donna Kelce has a way of telling family stories that land with equal parts warmth and alarm. Sitting down at Disney World for an episode of Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast, the mother of Jason and Travis Kelce opened a window into the years before Super Bowl parades and prime time spotlights.
What emerged were vivid scenes of two energetic boys testing limits and a mother improvising through it all.
Donna Kelce reveals a secret from before her sons Travis and Jason were born
Kylie began with a simple curiosity about the brothers’ personalities.
“Now, is there one that you would say is tougher or just different [to raise]?” she asked.
Donna answered by mapping the contrast that, in her view, showed up early.
“You know, I think Jason, because he was the oldest and, you know, always the elder child in the family, not all the time, but especially with Jason, he would tend to listen and follow the rules,” she said. “Yeah. Travis isn’t a rule follower.”
From there, the conversation shifted into moments that became family lore. One story centered on a three-year-old Travis who was already studying every move his parents made, especially when it came to the car keys.
“I used to have to keep the keys up high, just like I had to keep the knives up high,” she recalled. “And Travis, for some reason, was opening up the drawers and he was climbing up them. He was 3, climbing up … And I’m all by myself. I go out the back door and there’s the two of them sitting in the car. Now mind you, the car was locked.”
What happened next still makes Donna shake her head.
“He knew exactly what we were doing,” she said. “He knew how to unlock the car door, get into it, and then slam it shut. And I don’t know how he did it, but somehow, and thank goodness, it was not an automatic. He put the keys in the car, he knew exactly what to do and turned it on and it jumped and went right through the garage door.” She added a detail that underscores how narrowly the scare avoided becoming a tragedy. “He could have been standing in front of it. It could have been a really bad moment.”
A childhood of curiosity and close calls
Another memory began with a neighbor’s alarm. After Donna brought Jason home from daycare and stepped inside to change, a voice outside shouted, “Oh my God, he’s got a knife!”
Donna says she did not need to ask who had reached something that was supposed to be out of reach.
“I knew who it was immediately,” she said. “I knew it was Jason. He was the only one that was tall enough who could reach them. And I literally had them high up in a cabinet because I had to keep everything sharp away from both of them. But yeah, I ran out there. I only had my shorts on and a bra. I literally ran out. And then everybody was clapping on the street.”
The scene that greeted her was as startling as it sounds. Jason was flipping knives into the air and watching them fall, while a younger Travis stood nearby taking it in. Donna‘s reaction captures a parent’s instant calculus when play turns dangerous.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they could have went right through his head,’ ” she recalled. “But yeah, that was a scary time. That was a scary one.”
