Granger Smith and wife Amber are currently expecting their fourth child, almost two years after their 3-year-old son River Kelly died after a drowning accident at home in June 2019. On Tuesday, the couple revealed in a video on their YouTube channel that they are planning to name their soon-to-be-born baby boy Maverick Beckham, a name that pays tribute to River in a thoughtful way.
“I really wanted Riv to be in the name, whatever name we picked, I wanted Riv to be a part of that name,” Amber explained. “We went back and forth — should we do middle name Kelly? Or should we do middle name River? I wanted Riv to be a part of his first name.” Ultimately, she “wanted this baby to have his own identity, and I didn’t want him to be so tied to River. But I did want him to have a little piece of his brother in his name.” No matter what, the couple wanted their fourth child’s name to have the letters “Riv” in it, and Amber shared that if the baby was a girl, they would have chosen the name Everleigh.
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“He’ll forever be connected to his big brother Riv,” Smith said of the family’s upcoming addition, who will join big sister London, 9, and brother Lincoln, 7. “He’ll forever be connected to that, so it’s important that his name is too.” Amber told fans that Maverick means “independent and non-conforming” and Smith added that Beckham “means, essentially, ‘home by the river.’ So Maverick Beckham Smith is the newest addition to the Smiths, coming with a vengeance, he is kicking like crazy!”
The singer added that he has liked the name Maverick his “whole life.” “It’s always been just an awesome name to me,” he said. “It could also represent, in the old cowboy days, and you’d find a calf, and it was off by itself, and you had to search for it and you found a maverick calf. I’ve always thought it would be cool for a little caboose, a little baby that wasn’t really supposed to be here, but is now and we weren’t expecting but now it’s here and he’s like the maverick baby of the Smiths.”
After River was born, Amber had her tubes tied, but she and Smith realized that they wanted to expand their family again. Though Amber’s surgery is irreversible, she was able to get pregnant with IVF. After miscarrying the first of the two viable embryos the couple produced via IVF, the second embryo stuck.
“Because of River’s life, this baby is allowed to be here, and without having River, we wouldn’t have this baby,” Amber previously told PEOPLE. “That’s really hard to wrap your brain around. But it’s almost a gift from River. It’s a gift from God, but it’s [also] a gift from River’s life, and his legacy that this baby is able to be here.”
