He Chased them around with a Knife!

I want to tell you a story. When our kids were younger, we shared a huge historic home with my sister and her husband. Their kids had grown and moved out and they had the extra space. It was a chaotic and beautiful adventure, many stories come from that house, but this one took place in the kitchen.

My husband and I were upstairs making the bed and suddenly we heard our two daughters, who were 5 and 7, in the kitchen downstairs, “screaming bloody murder,” as my mom would say. Not the loud squealing that could be playful or out of surprise. No, these…these were screams of sheer terror. We tore down the stairs to find our daughters standing on the table shrieking and holding each other, while their 2-year-old brother tried to climb up the chairs from the floor and onto the table. He was screaming, too, clearly terrified, AND he was holding a large, sharp kitchen knife – the kind you would use to cut open a melon.

I screamed “WHAT’S HAPPENING?” and both girls shouted and pointed at their cherubic baby brother, and screamed “He chased us around with a KNIFE! He’s trying to KILL US!!!”

BY now, my husband, had safely disarmed our toddler, and was comforting the child crying in his daddy’s arms, shaken up. I helped the girls down from the table and calmed them enough that I could find out why our previously non-violent cutie pie had turned homicidal.

Here is what we were able to piece together:

Aunt Linda had been cutting a cantaloupe, and had left the knife on the cutting board on the table (bad Auntie Linda!). The girls had been singing and dancing in the kitchen with their baby brother, Benny, as was a regular occurrence in our home. Well, everything was fine, when Benny grabbed the knife and started chasing them around the kitchen screaming. They ran around the island a few times and then climbed up onto the table, then we finally heard their cries for help and showed up.