How Jason Aldean and Wife Brittany Are Starting a New Chapter with Daughter After Vegas Shooting
Brittany Kerr Aldean is haunted by her memories of the Las Vegas shooting, and confesses in an exclusive new PEOPLE interview, “I still think about it daily, and I still shake when I think about it.”
Country star Jason Aldean was performing at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival on Oct. 1, 2017, his then-pregnant wife in a tent behind the stage, when a gunman fired bullets into the audience from his hotel window. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old gambler and real-estate businessman, killed 58 people and injured over 400 others.
As she hid in her tent and listened to the shots ringing out, Brittany thought of her unborn child, son Memphis, now 16 months old. It had taken a year and a half of in vitro fertilization treatments to get pregnant with him, and she recalls thinking, ” ‘It took me so long to have this child, and now I’m not ever going to meet him.’ “
But she did. The Aldeans survived the tragedy and have since been able to welcome not only Memphis into the world but, more recently, his little sister Navy Rome.
At just 9 weeks old, Navy is the 31-year-old former cheerleader’s second child, and the sixth member of the Aldean household (which also includes the singer’s daughters Kendyl, 11, and Keeley, 16, from his previous marriage).
Brittany can’t wait for the new chapter that her baby girl brings, exclaiming delightedly that “Navy is going to be my little best friend that I take shopping and get my nails done with. I’m so excited to do all the girly things with her.”
Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Parents newsletter.
That includes sharing wardrobes, as the new mom jokes that she’s going to try and stay fashionable so that her daughter will want to borrow her clothes.
But aside from these typical mother-daughter activities, Navy’s childhood is set to be far from ordinary — Brittany is planning on taking her and her big brother on tour with their dad.
“She’s a little young right now so we may wait until towards the end of the year to go on the road with him, but that is our goal, to all be out there as a family so the kids can experience that life and see their dad perform,” she tells PEOPLE.
The mother of two even hopes that one day her daughter will follow in the 42-year-old country artist’s musical footsteps: “I’m praying that Navy can sing!”
