Hoda Kotb Gets Choked Up Recalling "the Minute" She Found Out She Was a Mom

It's been almost a year since Hoda Kotb adopted a baby girl named Haley Joy, and during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she reminisced on the moment she found out she was going to be a mom.

"I stopped for a minute. I looked at the clock and I wrote down 11:54 a.m. I knew that was the minute it was changing. I just felt it. And I dialed the number, and [a woman from the adoption agency] answered the phone and she said, 'She's here,'" Hoda recalled while getting choked up. "I would take my worst day, the day when everything's falling apart since Haley, over my favorite day before. She changed everything."

The 53-year-old anchor also opened up about telling her boyfriend of four years, Joel Schiffman, that she wanted to pursue adoption. "I had thought about having kids for a long, long time. But one day I was sitting with my boyfriend and I said to him, 'I'm going to have to talk to you about something because I can't push it down anymore' . . . I said, 'Don't answer now. Take a day, take a week, take some time. But I want to talk to you about this,'" she recalled. "And he said, 'OK, what is it?' And I said, 'I would like to explore adoption with you.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't need a day,' and I knew I'd chosen the right man." Fast forward and now Haley is walking and Hoda is kicking butt as one half of the first female team to anchor Today on NBC.