Hoda Kotb Reveals the Sweet Meaning Behind Daughter Hope Catherine’s Name

When Hoda Kotb adopted her second baby girl Hope Catherine she didn’t have to think too hard about what she was going to name her little bundle of joy. Her baby’s name came easy to her because she already knew who she wanted to pay homage to.

“Catherine is my best friend’s daughter’s name and it just so happens that this weekend when [Hope] was born, when we got her, it was also John’s birthday — my best friend’s husband who passed,” she recently said to Savannah Guthrie and Jenna Bush Hager on Today. “So it was a very emotional time for all of us and I said to Catherine, ‘you’re the strongest kid I know.'”

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After hearing Hoda’s heartwarming story, Jenna, 37, told her that “Hope” was a perfect name for her child. “This is so beautiful because there is death and there is life,” Jenna said while tearing up. “We have a baby Hope in our family!”

Welcoming baby No. 2 has been everything that Hoda, 54, has ever dreamed of. “It’s one of those things where you think you’ve done it all, you think you’ve felt it all. But I just didn’t know that this kind of love existed,” she previously gushed to Entertainment Tonight about her family.

Hoda couldn’t have picked a better time to adopt Hope either. She said when she first thought about adopting her first daughter, Haley Joy Kotb, in 2017, she felt like “it was too late” to start a family, but once she took her daughter home, she knew she was wrong.

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“I think the thing we all need to know [is] when your child arrives for you, that child is right on time,” she gushed. “So your time may be when you are in your 30s or in your 40s or your 50s, but your child is right on time.”