“They didn’t see him any different. They’re like, ‘He’s still Superman.’ They still see him as this amazing giant figure who can do anything.”
Hoda Kotb has always had a way with words — first as a TV host and now as a mother.
During a Sept. 23 appearance on “Jenna & Friends” — a show she used to co-host with Jenna Bush Hager — Kotb gave her own masterclass on how to explain adoption to a child.
“I was telling them about adoption, and I thought, 'How do you tell that story to your kids?'" she said of her two adopted daughters Haley, 8, and Hope, 6.
"And I said at first, 'You weren’t born in my tummy, you were born in my heart,' and they were like, 'Oh, OK,'" she continued.
As her daughters got older, Kotb knew she had to be a little more elaborate about their origin.
“All of a sudden I thought, 'I have to tell them every child comes from a tummy.' So I go, 'Well actually, you came from another person's tummy, and so did you,'" she said a few years later.
Kotb went on to explain to them that they have a “birth mother angel.”
"God gave her the job to carry you so that she could give you to me. That was her job,” she continued.
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“And then they said, 'Our birth mother angel.' I said, 'Yeah.' 'Is she alive?' 'Yeah, somewhere out there, we don't know who that is yet,'" she added.
Kotb shares her two daughters with her ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.
The former couple started dating in 2013, according to Us Weekly, and adopted their first daughter, Haley, in 2017. Their second daughter Hope followed in 2019.
Kotb and Schiffman announced their engagement later that year before breaking up in 2022, per People.
Hoda Kotb says Thomas Rhett inspired her conversation about adoption
Kotb’s appearance came on the same day her new book, “Jump and Find Joy,” was released.
In the book, she opened up about talking to her kids about adoption and how she was inspired to do so following an interview with country music star Thomas Rhett.
"When I shared with Thomas that my two daughters were starting to ask questions about their adoption, he said that he and Lauren were navigating the topic as well," she wrote in the book, per Today.com.
Rhett explained to her that “adoption is one of the most beautiful things in the world.”
“I don’t think at the beginning of it you think, 'In six years I’m going to have to start answering some really intense questions,'" Rhett told Kotb.
“What age is the right age for the conversation? How do I preserve their wonderful innocence? We try to be as honest as we can without the confusion,” she added in the book.
Thomas Rhett is the father of four (soon-to-be five) kids — one of which is adopted.
After years of trying to conceive naturally, he and his wife met a girl in Uganda who was born in 2015. They immediately started the adoption process before finding out they were pregnant a few months later.
According to People, their first daughter Willa Gray was adopted in May 2017. Their second daughter, Ada James, was born on Aug. 12, 2017.
Rhett and Lauren Akins have since welcomed two more daughters into their family — Lennon Love, born on Feb. 10, 2020, and Lillie Carolina, born on Nov. 15, 2021.
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On Aug. 26, Rhett and Akins announced that they were expecting their fifth child on Instagram.
