DEXTER – While plenty of dads were sleeping late, or getting breakfast in bed, or just leisurely reading the paper Sunday morning, Kaine Gilman was kneeling on his bathroom floor in a panic.

“What do I do? What do I do?” he shouted to his longtime partner, Brenda Brawn.

“I don’t know,” she shouted back.

What he did, he said later, just came naturally. At 7:59 a.m. he caught their fourth daughter as she was unexpectedly born at home.

Andrea Lee Gilman. Six pounds, 12 ounces.

Happy Father’s Day, Kaine.

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

Little Andrea wasn’t due until July 18, Brawn said from her hospital room at Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft. “I guess this is not the way we planned it. But she is all right, so that’s all that matters.”

Brawn said the Father’s Day surprise began early.

“I had been up for a couple of hours and was feeling just a little pain. I figured she was just positioned funny,” Brawn said.

“But then my water broke,” she explained. Still thinking she had plenty of time, Brawn sent Gilman into the shower and she began calling family members. Within minutes, however, Brawn realized the time was now.

“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!”

He only had seconds to call 911 and get an ambulance started their way when his wife called to him again.

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,” Gilman said. “I was so scared. I won’t kid you. But I knew she was counting on me.”

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

He took a minute to run out to the road and wave the ambulance in, then 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, laughing. But he is extraordinarily proud of the special role he played in the delivery and took some time Sunday afternoon to drive to BB’s Tattoo in Newport to get his daughter’s name and birth date inked on his shoulder.

Two of Brawn and Gilman’s young daughters – Olivia, 2, and Peyton, 3 – wandered into the bathroom while the delivery was under way. The couple’s oldest daughter, Morgan, 7, was on a sleepover elsewhere and missed the excitement. “Mommy got the baby in the bathroom,” Peyton bragged to hospital visitors.

Mom will head home today, she said, and Dad has taken a bit of paternity leave from his job at a drywall company.

They’ll need some time. They’re getting married in three weeks.