DEXTER (AP) – Kaine Gilman is unlikely to forget the special Father’s Day gift he received this year. But if he does, there’s a reminder tattooed on his shoulder.

While other fathers were opening gifts or enjoying breakfast in bed, Gilman found himself kneeling on his bathroom floor in a panic, shouting to longtime partner Brenda Brawn, “What do I do? What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” Brawn shouted back.

What he did came naturally, Gilman later recalled, and at 7:59 a.m. Sunday he caught their fourth daughter as she was unexpectedly born at home.

The new arrival, Andrea Lee Gilman, weighed 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

“Having the baby on the bathroom floor is amazing,” the proud father told the Bangor Daily News. “But to have her on Father’s Day is just unbelievable. How many fathers got a gift like this today?”

From her room at Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, Brawn explained that Andrea wasn’t due until July 18.

“I guess this is not the way we planned it. But she is all right, so that’s all that matters,” she said.

Brawn had been up for a couple of hours and was feeling a little pain, she said, “but then my water broke.” Still thinking she had plenty of time, she started calling family members. But within minutes, she realized time was running out.

“I told Kaine that I just wasn’t going to make it. I knew,” she said.

Said Gilman: “You think you’re nervous when your wife says it’s time to head to the hospital, but you can’t imagine what it’s like when she says, ‘It’s now!”

With only seconds to call 911 and get an ambulance dispatched, instinct took over. Brawn sat down on the bathroom floor, and with one arm draped over the toilet and the cat dish pressing into her back, she pushed and Gilman caught.

“It was the most amazing thing,” he said. “I was so scared. I won’t kid you. But I knew she was counting on me.”

Gilman turned his daughter over and held her upside down, making sure she could breathe. When she began to cry, the couple finally started to relax. “That was the most beautiful sound ever,” he said.

After running to the road to wave the ambulance in, Gilman cut the umbilical cord, “just like I did with my other three girls.”

“Boy, everyone has been calling me Dr. Gilman all day,” he said. Proud of his role in the delivery, Gilman drove Sunday afternoon to BB’s Tattoo in Newport to get his daughters name and birth date inked on his shoulder.

Two of Brawn and Gilman’s daughters Olivia, 2, and Peyton, 3 wandered into the bathroom during the delivery. The couple’s oldest daughter, Morgan, 7, was on a sleep-over elsewhere and missed the excitement.

“Mommy got the baby in the bathroom,” Peyton bragged to hospital visitors.

Brawn was scheduled to leave the hospital Monday, and Gilman has taken paternity leave from his job at a drywall company.

The time will come in handy. They’re getting married in three weeks.

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