Dancing With the Stars pros Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy found the perfect name for their second child after he was born on Sunday, June 18.
“Rio John Chmerkovskiy 💙,” Murgatroyd, 36, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, June 21. “We are overjoyed to share our baby boy with all of you. @shai.aleksander is already the best big brother and we all feel very complete. Life is good.”
The couple, who are already parents to 6-year-old son Shai, picked the name John as Rio’s middle name to honor Murgatroyd’s late father after his December 2022 death.
The New Zealand native gave birth to Rio on Father’s Day before Chmerkovskiy, 43, shared his first photo.
“Happy Father’s Day to me,” the Ukraine native captioned a Sunday Instagram photo as he held his newborn son. “#MadeInPeta.”
The duo, who wed in 2017, revealed in January that they were expecting baby No. 2 after suffering previous miscarriages and failed IVF cycles.
“It wasn’t like I was jumping up out of the bathroom, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait to [tell everyone].’ It was almost like I was scared,” the Peta Jane Beauty founder exclusively told Us Weekly in March of learning she was pregnant. “It was a positively scary moment for me because it wasn’t something that I was sure of. It wasn’t something that I knew would last. I definitely wanted to, just sort of, hide my emotions a little bit and just kind of put a protective shield around myself to not let myself get too excited before this [turned] into something real.”
Rio arrived nearly five months after his uncle Val Chmerkovskiy and aunt Jenna Johnson welcomed their first child. Val, 37, and Johnson, 29, also sought a travel-inspired moniker for their baby boy: Rome.
“The Chmerkovskiy clan is really going through a renaissance at the moment,” Maksim previously gushed to Us in January. “I cannot wait for this next generation. … [Peta and my] kids are gonna be six years apart, which is basically the exact same distance that Val and I have. Plus, Val’s son is born in January, and my son and I are Capricorns [too].”
The Masked Dancer alum added: “There are a lot of these [similarities and] I have a picture where I’m holding Val when he was a newborn and I was 6, and then we put it side by side with a picture of my son, who’s 6, holding Val’s son, who’s a newborn, and it was amazing.”
