Today’s Hoda Kotb Shares Why She’s Relocating in New York With Daughters Haley and Hope
Hoda Kotb is preparing for an upcoming move, and her daughters are the reason behind the big decision.
“I was thinking about moving. My kids and are going to move somewhere to a new school,” Kotb, 59, revealed on the Wednesday, March 27, episode of her “Making Space” podcast. The Today host is the mother of daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 4, whom she shares with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.
While discussing the move with her podcast guest, author Arthur Brooks, Kotb reminisced about the “many times” she’s changed locations throughout her life. “I remember once my parents moved us to Nigeria. I was in fourth grade, I was horrified,” she shared. “We get to this place, the language was different, everybody seemed different and it was hard. I moved again in sixth grade.”
Kotb continued: “It’s so funny because the stories I tell now as an adult, are the stories of how I endured or what I did to cope. Yet at the same time, as I’m preparing my kids, I feel like I’m trying to protect them from things that they should probably be into.”
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Noting that the moving process will “be more bad than good at the beginning,” Brooks, 59, shared some tips on how to make the transition smoother for Kotb and her kids. “When you move to a new place, pretend you’ve lived there for 10 years already,” he said, suggesting Kotb throw gatherings with friends and family like she would at her current home. “It’s a complete game-changer because you speed up the clock.”
Kotb continued to open up about her move on the Thursday, March 28, episode of Today With Hoda and Jenna, clarifying that she and her girls are not leaving the “New York area.”
“It’s interesting because think about how many times you’ve moved in your life,” she told her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager. “Every time I moved in my life, and you moved in yours, it was like, all of a sudden, it was a huge adjustment. But the stories I tell about growing in my life come from those.”
Thursday’s episode of Hoda and Jenna marked Kotb’s return to the series after taking a brief break from the show on Wednesday. Although she had appeared on the first two hours of Today, Willie Geist stepped in to cohost alongside Bush Hager, 42.
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Though neither Kotb nor her cohost shared the reason behind her absence at the time, she gave fans a glimpse at how she spent her day post-filming. “This makes me so happy. Little Hopey ?? @katyperry,” she captioned a Wednesday Instagram video of Hope riding on a scooter while singing “Firework” by Katy Perry.
Kotb later explained her absence at the top of Thursday’s Hoda and Jenna episode. “A good friend of ours, who we both love dearly, Laura [Castorino], who does our hair, her mom passed,” she shared, going on to call the hairstylist “one of the good eggs” and praising her for being a “mothering” figure to the show’s staff.
