A Michigan mom says she's feeling grateful after she unexpectedly gave birth in a McDonald's parking lot last week.
"It could have just gone so different," Alyce Rotunda, a mom of four, told "Good Morning America." "I'm just in awe of how it played out and that it ended well."
Rotunda, 32, said everything unfolded quickly in the early morning hours of Aug. 11. The day before, she said she and her husband Kevin Rotunda II had traveled to Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, about an hour away from their home in the Centreville-Sturgis area, because she had started having contractions.
"While we're just sitting there waiting to see, you know, if things were going to start progressing, the contractions kind of stopped. So we spent a few hours up there [at the hospital] the night before, just to get sent home," Rotunda said.
On Sunday, which Rotunda said happened to be her birthday, she said she continued to experience symptoms, including a migraine, nausea and on-and-off contractions. After 2 a.m., Rotunda said her husband called her mother, who lived nearby, to come over and watch their three older kids, and they set off for the hospital.
Rotunda said midway through the drive to the hospital, she and her husband realized they wouldn't be able to make it in time, and her husband called 911.
"[My husband] whipped into McDonald's. The 911 dispatcher's on the phone trying to kind of guide us," Rotunda recalled. "After he pulled in and parked, my husband kind of helped me get out of the van."
Rotunda said their fourth baby's arrival, one week before she was scheduled to be induced, was swift.
"After I stood up, I could feel things were happening," she said. "And so, I actually reached down and fully felt her head, like her head was already coming out at that point. And so I yelled to my husband, I was like, 'You need to catch her right now.'"
Rotunda said her husband was able to catch their daughter Matilda "right in the nick of time."
"It was a whole whirlwind when she was born," said Rotunda. "I'm so incredibly blessed and thankful that as soon as she came out, she started crying. So that was a huge sigh of relief on our end."
Rotunda, who said she has Type 1 diabetes and has a prior history of hemorrhaging after birth, said she was nervous at the time, but after first responders arrived and took her and Matilda back to Bronson Methodist Hospital, they were both checked out and didn't have any major complications.
Matilda has now joined her older siblings -- sister Genesis and brothers Kevin III and Boone -- at home. Alyce Rotunda said some of their relatives have already nicknamed their fourth child "McTilly."
"We have every intention of just calling her Tilly instead of Matilda. And so, now that this all happened, they just threw a 'Mc' on there," she said.
