Jenna Bush Hager’s Son Hal, 5, Pulls Off Epic Prank on 1st Day of School: ‘He Was Busted’
By Samantha Agate,
2024-09-06
Jenna Bush Hager’s son, Hal, loves to make her laugh! The Today host revealed that her youngest child pulled off an epic prank on the first day of school this year.
Jenna, 42, explained that she took her three kids, Mila, Poppy and 5-year-old Hal, to their first day of school during a Today episode on Thursday, September 5. When she went to pick the kids up, Hal made a shocking remark.
“I picked Hal up and Mila was with me,” she told cohost Hoda Kotb. “And I said, ‘Hal, how was school?’ And he said, ‘Pretty good, but I went to the principal’s office.'”
“Day one! I mean, the school day was like 12 minutes,” she said. Jenna explained that she asked Hal, “‘OK, so why did you go to the principal’s office?’” The little one responded, “’I squirted apple sauce.’”
At first, Jenna, who shares the children with husband Henry Hager, was concerned that her son had gotten in trouble at school. But then she realized that it was all a ruse to rile her up.
“It sounded like it was an accident … and Mila looked at me like, ‘He’s lying,’” the former first daughter told her colleague.
To make things even funnier, Jenna decided to tell Hal that she would ask his teacher about the alleged apple sauce incident when she met them at back-to-school night this year. That prompted Hal to finally confess that he was pranking her after all.
“He knew he was busted,” the mom of three told viewers. In the end, Hal said that he had “the best day ever” at school.
Joking around and pranking each other is a pretty common occurrence in the Hager household. On April Fools Day, Jenna revealed that she tried pulling off a prank at home that ended up going wrong. She detailed the whole incident on a subsequent episode of Today.
“Well first — and this was my doing — I had Hal, who is 4, we warmed some beans up in the microwave,” the mom of three said. “I tried to take a play out of George Clooney’s book. He was supposed to go to sleep but we waited for Henry to come home. We had already set it up where I told Henry, ‘Yeah, everything fine but Hal’s stomach is not great, not great.’”
“I put them in a small little cup,” Jenna added. “We hid in the living room. Hall practiced multiple times: ‘Ouch, Daddy! My stomach hurts! Oh no, I pooped my pants!’ And then wipe it on Henry.”
But things certainly did not go according to plan when it came time to execute the prank.
“So, we had it planned. Hal was like, ‘It’s go time, it’s go time!’ Ran in. ‘Dad, ooh, my stomach, I pooped my pants’ and wiped it all over Henry’s clothes. He was like, ‘Dude, these are …’ It didn’t work. But then, I’ll show you exhibit B,” Jenna said while showing a picture of Mila. “I had to call her in and say, ‘Now you need to clean up a 45-year-old man’s …” Jenna said, as Hoda, 60, chimed in, “Pee pee?”
At the end of the day, Jenna decided to try and pull off a second prank. She told the kids their cat Hollywood was pregnant by their other cat Mango.
“Um … they fell for it and when I told [them] it wasn’t true? Tears. They thought they were going to have kittens. So anyway,” Jenna confessed.
Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.