Growing up with an equally mischievous twin sister, Jenna Bush Hager knows a thing or two about naughty behavior. Now she's getting payback from her own girls.
“My kids got in trouble for the first time, together,” she told Hoda Kotb while filling in Thursday during TODAY’s Fourth Hour.
It started when she left the girls, Mila, 5, and Poppy, 3, with their babysitter, whom Jenna described as “very kind, and I feel like they witnessed that kindness and they took advantage.”
Jenna was just heading out to a function for an educational charity involving her sister, Barbara Bush, when she looked at her phone and saw messages from the sitter. The girls had locked themselves in the master bedroom — and their sitter out — for the 45 minutes.
Jenna said she was “furious.”
“I don’t want them to be disrespectful to a babysitter,” she told Hoda.
That’s when she had the sitter put the call on speakerphone and hold it to the door so she could talk to her daughters.
“I said 'I’m going to call the police.' Is that overreacting? Because they unlocked the door,” she said.
But by the time Jenna came home, her girls “were running around the house, naked.” They also had gotten into her makeup drawer.
“I took deep breaths. I wasn’t livid; I was disappointed,” she explained.
Jenna didn't end up calling the cops on her girls after all — but she did take away the girls' toys as punishment.
Though the entire experience got her worked up and questioning whether she had lost her grip on parenting, Jenna said she got some much-needed perspective the next day from her fellow TODAY correspondent, Maria Shriver.
“I love that,” she told Jenna. “They’re doing that together. How awesome is it that they have, like, a little partner in crime?”