Jenna Bush Hager and her husband Henry Hager welcomed their third child and first son, Henry Harold Hager, last week.
Jenna is one of President George W. Bush's two daughters, and baby Hal is his first grandson. Bush posted a family photo of the family on Instagram. Jenna joked that her dad was "a little mad that the name wasn't George."
Hager is a new co-anchor of the fourth hour of the Today show after she was announced as Kathie Lee Gifford's replacement in February 2019. Not long after that announcement, Jenna's co-anchor Hoda Kotb went on maternity leave and Jenna announced on-air that she was more than five months pregnant. (She said back then: "Y'all, I'm very pregnant. So I don't know how I hid this.")
In an interview by phone Monday on the Today show, just a few days after baby Hal was born, Jenna said everyone is doing well.
"We weren't exactly sure about the name, but then his big sisters arrived and they called him Hal Pal — and we thought, 'This is just perfect,'" she said by phone.
Fellow Today staffer Willie Geist told Today listeners that he was hosting a TV show with Jenna when she realized she needed to go to the hospital last week. He joked that she "walked from the set to the hospital and had the baby." Jenna quipped, by the phone, that she was glad the TV show was taped.
Hager told her news friends: "When you're holed up in a hospital room with a newborn, and you see the joy and the light in his eyes, you realize this is what life's for — to make the world better for our little babes. And even though the news outside these walls isn't so great, you see the joy in their eyes and know that's what we're here to do: to make their lives safe."
