Haley has completely taken to her new role, Kotb said: “She was literally marching around saying, ‘I’m a big sister!’ ” — so much so that “she did try to crawl into [Hope’s] bassinet.”
Kotb explained that she thought she was “full” when it came to giving love after welcoming Haley in February 2017, but her experience when she and boyfriend Joel Schiffman brought Hope home proved otherwise.
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“Joel and I were standing there when they hand you the baby — and it’s the closest thing to a live birth I think you’ll ever see — [and] in that moment I was like, ‘My God.’ My heart just grew 10 times, it’s amazing,” she said. “I just can’t believe it’s happening, y’all. I can’t.”
The proud mom went on to describe the heart-melting moment Haley first met her baby sister: “We’d been telling her, ‘Baby Hope’s coming,’ and she literally walked up to her and looked at her and she goes, ‘Hope!’ “
“You hope, you pray, you dream about things, and we thought about Hope,” Kotb said of her baby girl’s moniker. “And we named her middle name Catherine after my best friend Karen, her daughter — I think you guys know that her husband passed a little while ago, and Catherine is so super strong.”