Hoda Kotb Shares Joyful Lakeside Vacation Photos With Her Daughters & Reflects on the Moments She Would Have Missed

Aug 13, 2026 by apost team

Hoda Kotb left the "Today" show in January 2025 — and she has spent every month since becoming the parent she always wanted to be. On August 8, 2026, she gave her followers a glimpse of what that looks like: a lakeside family getaway with her two daughters, Haley Joy, 9, and Hope Catherine, 7, and a slideshow full of the kind of moments she spent years waking up at 3:15 a.m. to miss.

Kotb, born Aug. 9, 1964, captioned the post simply: "Summer days," set to Alan Gogoll's gentle instrumental "Sunny Side of the Stream." The photographs showed Haley and Hope swimming in the lake with friends, jumping in, splashing each other, and doing what children do when an adult puts the phone away and lets the afternoon run. Kotb herself jumped in alongside them, wearing a colorful halter bikini, a gold necklace, and a bun.

Fans flooded the comment section with warmth. "This is what life is about," one wrote. Another added: "You look amazing and so happy!" A third simply posted: "Summer goals."

The photographs arrived two days before Kotb's 62nd birthday on August 9 — her second birthday since leaving NBC. She spent the first one adjusting. She appears to be spending this one fully arrived.

In an interview with PEOPLE earlier this year, she had described what the shift has felt like. "I got to see Haley sing 'What a Wonderful World' at 9:15 a.m. — I would have missed that," she said. "I used to think life was the big things, but it really is all the stuff that happens in between."

The lakeside photographs were some of that stuff.

Hope Catherine, 7, lives with type 1 diabetes — one of the central reasons Kotb has spoken about for leaving "Today" when she did. "It's kind of constant care for Hope," she told PEOPLE in January 2025. "I really wanted to and needed to be here to watch over her. So, whenever she needs anything, and it can happen at night, multiple times, I'm up." She was careful to add: "But I would never, ever want Hope to one day grow up and say, 'Oh, my mom left her job because of me.' It wasn't that alone. But if you look at it cumulatively, it was a part of that decision."

The lakeside trip also included Joel Schiffman — Kotb's ex-fiancé and the co-parent of both Haley and Hope — alongside Kotb's mother, Sameha. A separate photograph from a Bahamas trip the family also took in early August showed the full extended family gathered together — Kotb, Schiffman, her mother and children — the kind of arrangement that has become one of the more quietly radical things she has modeled publicly. A family defined by love rather than conventional structure.

Haley Joy Kotb was adopted on January 9, 2017. Hope Catherine Kotb was adopted on April 13, 2019. Both came from Kotb's heart, as she has told them. "You didn't come from Mommy's tummy, you came from my heart," she told them, sharing the conversation on PEOPLE's Me Becoming Mom podcast in 2021. "And they understand that."

Kotb turned 62 on August 9, 2026. She has spent the past year and a half living the life she said she left to find. At the lake, in the summer, with nowhere else to be — she appeared to have found it.

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Are you a fan of Hoda Kotb and her family? Do you think her decision to leave "Today" to be present for her daughters is one of the most admirable choices a public figure has made in recent years? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and other fans out there!

Follow the link to see her photos on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbeHacgz04Y/?hl=en