Hoda Kotb Announces Adoption of Baby No. 2

Time for baby number two! Today show anchor Hoda Kotb announced Tuesday that she adopted baby girl Hope Catherine, meaning that daughter Haley Joy, 2, is a big sister.

Kotb’s Hoda & Jenna co-host, Jenna Bush Hager, helped make the announcement during the Today show on Tuesday. She interrupted a discussion during Today‘s 8 a.m. hour to tell everyone she had a major exclusive about a celebrity who she had on the phone.

“Do you have something you want to tell us?” Bush Hager asked Kotb over the phone.

“Hi guys! It’s a girl! It’s a girl! And her name is Hope,” Kotb said, with excitement brimming from her voice.

“I’m feeding her, and I can’t believe it,” Kotb said through tears. “I’m so happy she’s here!”

She added that Haley is over the moon to be a big sister. “This morning at breakfast (Haley) was trying to feed (Hope) her raspberries and I was like, ‘Not yet, babe,’” she said. “She was literally marching around saying, ‘I’m a big sister!’”

She spoke about the decision to raise another child with boyfriend Joel Schiffman.

“You know what’s funny? You think that you’re full,” she said. “That’s exactly how I felt with Haley and Joel and everything. Joel and I were standing there when they hand you the baby, and it’s the closest thing to a live birth you’ll ever see, but in that moment I was like, ‘Oh my God, my heart just grew.’

“It’s amazing. I can’t believe it’s happening.”

Kotb said it’s been an emotional week for Schiffman. “He cried when Tiger Woods won the Masters, and he cried when Hope was carried into the room,” she joked.

She explained that she gave Hope the middle name Catherine in honor of her best friend, Karen Swensen, whose 15-year-old daughter is named Catherine. Swensen lost her husband of 18 years, New Orleans homicide detective John Ronquillo, when he died at 64 from cancer last year.

Kotb, 54, became a first-time mom in 2017 when she adopted Haley Joy.

In March, Kotb told Entertainment Tonight that she was open to giving Haley a sibling.

“We don’t know when, but it is something that is important to me and to Joel,” Kotb admitted while promoting her new children’s book, You Are My Happy. “We like the idea of Haley [having] a sibling because she has had such interesting circumstances to grow up. So, it would be nice to be able to share it with somebody.”

She added that she always had an ache to fulfill the role of motherhood that she couldn’t ignore.

“I always had this thing inside me like a voice that I couldn’t quiet,” she recalled. “It was a voice that [told me I] wanted to be a mom, but I thought it was too late. You can push a voice like that away for a long time but sooner or later it comes back up, and you have to address it.”

“I feel like if you’re meant to have a child in your life, your child is out there,” Kotb said on the Today show on World Adoption Day in 2018. “They said to me at the adoption agency, ‘Don’t worry, your child is out there waiting for you.’ And I remember I would scribble in my journal, ‘I know you’re there.’ I could feel her.”

Kotb hinted at her big announcement on Monday with an Instagram post that read “Choose Hope.” Little did fans know how personal the post would turn out to be.