Jenna Bush Hager recently recalled the exceptionally awkward surprise 16th birthday party that her parents – former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush — threw for her and her twin sister, Barbara Bush Coyne.
Bush Hager described the scene during Tuesday morning’s broadcast of “TODAY with Jenna and Hoda,” noting that she and her sister were set up with a surprise breakfast after being told that they had to be up early in order to make it to their drivers’ tests.
“I had a surprise party for my 16th birthday, me and Barbara. We had one together and it was a pancake breakfast which was cute,” she said. “We were going to kiss my dad goodbye for school, my mom was like, ‘Go in and tell dad goodbye,’ and we walked in and all of our friends were sitting there.”
But then Bush Hager added a little context, explaining what had made the moment so awkward for her especially: her parents had invited both her ex-boyfriend and her current boyfriend, and had managed to seat them next to each other.
“My parents were very creative birthday people which was fun but then it gets kind of awkward because it’s like [they have] the old boyfriend sitting next to the new boyfriend,” she said.
“They invited both boyfriends?” Bush Hager’s cohost Hoda Kotb asked, appearing surprised. “Your parents are wild.”
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It wasn’t the first time that Bush Hager has spilled the tea on her parents, revealing in 2022 that her father — apparently frustrated with her wedding plans — had encouraged her to elope.
"My dad wanted us to elope because it was a pain." https://t.co/RlzU6OKaip
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 6, 2022
“My dad wanted us to elope because it was a pain,” she told Kotb at the time. “He was like, ‘What are y’all doing? Y’all should just elope.’ I don’t know if he wanted us to go to Vegas to do it.”
Bush Hager did not take the then-President’s advice, and instead married Henry Chase Hager at the Bush family’s Prairie Chapel Ranch near Crawford, Texas.