So where has Kathie Lee Gifford been?

We have been waiting since the start of 2015 for KLG to be reunited with her Hoda.

And today it happened!

Kathie Lee Gifford returned to the fourth hour of the Today show after being off since the start of the new year. She's been gone all month, spending much of it at her home in Florida. She has Skyped in at times, but today she was in the studio with her cohort Hoda Kotb.

"You were expecting Barry Manilow?" Gifford cracked, while walking in the hallway as she entered the studio.

"No, it's me. Hi everybody, I'm back."

She said she was "not having cosmetic surgery." And she said she was just fine.

"You kept telling everybody I was on vacation, Hoda!" she chided Kotb.

So where was she?

"Here's the thing. Years ago, I got in my contract that I could do the show either from Florida or California in the wintertime. I never took anybody up on it. And then all of a sudden I realized I was old. And old people go to Florida in the wintertime. So I said to the producers, let's do the show from Miami."

That didn't happen. Instead they told her to just be on the show from Florida, and she did that for many of the days this month.

KLG, who is 61, added, "You know what? Frank's going to be 85 this year. My mother just turned 85. I'm close behind them."

So she wanted to be in Florida.

As for how she spent her days, she said she watched the news from Florida, took "long walks" with friends, met with fans, took boat rides. "It went by like that!"

How much did she miss her Today gig?

"I missed you a lot," KLG said to Hoda. "I did not miss getting up at 4 a.m. Didn't miss the cold."

She also assured, "Frank is fine" and shared a photo of him by the water, the sun setting behind him.