Hoda Kotb had quite a memorable weekend with her daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 5.
“I was with a friend and she has a backyard pool, and me and my girls and my best friend … we skinny-dipped!” Kotb, 59, told Sheinelle Jones — who was filling in for Jenna Bush Hager — on the Monday, June 24, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “It was so fun. My kids were screaming. They were literally shrieking with delight.”
Kotb went on to note that her friend’s husband, who was barbequing food for the group, “literally had a paper plate he was holding up” in front of his face. “It was hilarious,” she added. “And by the way, you know, I said to my kids, ‘This is our day.’ Like literally, we got out of [the pool], the towels were right there. We were, like, running inside, screaming the whole time. It was so fun.”
In addition to calling Kotb “such a good mom,” Jones, 46, joked that while Kotb and her kids enjoyed the spontaneous moment, “Just tell them there’s a time and a place, so next time they’re at the water park …”
Kotb also shared that her kids threw a “disco dance party” for the three of them over the weekend. “I was like, ‘OK,’ I didn’t know they knew disco,” she quipped. “So, literally, I helped them with a few things and I left.”
All by themselves, Haley and Hope decorated their playroom with signs, balloons and multi-color lights, set up a dinner table with a menu and hung a tin foil disco ball from the ceiling. “You know what? That will be one of their best memories,” Jones said to her cohost.
Kotb showed pics and clips of the disco dance party on Monday’s Hoda & Jenna episode but did not post them via social media. Her daughters most recently appeared via her Instagram in a sweet Father’s Day tribute she posted for her ex-fiancé, Joel Schiffman.
“Happy father’s day to the best dad!” she captioned a June 16 photo of Schiffman, 66, cuddled up with Haley and Hope on a couch. Kotb and Schiffman adopted their daughters in 2017 and 2019 before ending their eight-year relationship in January 2022.
Earlier this month, Kotb got emotional while discussing moving to a new area of New York City with her girls. She previously revealed during a March episode of her “Making Space” podcast that her family was moving to change schools.
“I was thinking about the very first time we brought them home and carried them up those stairs in that car seat and placed them in a little thing and all the things that happened there,” Kotb emotionally told Bush Hager, 42, on June 3. “And I was looking through old videos of them, when they were so little, and it’s like you want to hold onto things and you want to let go. And when I saw these videos of them when they were kids, little babies, I can’t believe I have a 7 and a 5-year-old. And I can’t believe all those memories. … There were so many things that we have built there.”
She noted that her goal was to not “race through” her move, explaining, “Don’t race through transitions. Don’t race through endings and say, ‘Let’s just wish it away.’”
