By Mary Beth Quirk From Consumerist

There’s a happy birthday, and then there’s “It’s my birthday and I’m having a baby in a Walmart parking lot.” A pregnant North Dakota woman had a scary situation on her hands when she went into labor right before she got into her car after a shopping trip.

At 34 weeks along (40 weeks being full-term, for anyone who’s never had a baby or lives under a rock), the 24-year-old woman said she was stretching before climbing into her vehicle and realized her baby was coming, and he was coming fast.

“I was kind of panicking and slightly embarrassed. I couldn’t believe I was having a baby in the parking lot of Walmart,” she tells KFYR-TV. “Plus I knew I was 6 weeks early and so you know there’s always a concern any time you have a baby that early even when you are in a hospital.”

Some of her fellow shoppers came to help her and called 9-1-1, but it seems like the little guy just didn’t want to wait. One bystander says she grabbed a sweatshirt from the car for the baby and got down on the ground to help. When she saw the baby’s head, she knew he was on his way, and fast.

“I just said ‘Okay, you gotta push one more time.’ And as she was pushing I grabbed the shoulders and kind of pulled as she was pushing and the baby came out and he was crying,” the no-doubt thunderstruck witness explained.

The new mother says she’s grateful that there were people around to help her with the unexpected delivery.

“I got really lucky that not only were they there but everything that could have gone wrong… didn’t,” she says.

Her son is doing well in the NICU, despite being born premature, and should be out of the hospital in about a week. And he’ll have a pretty good party story to tell for the rest of his life.

IMAGE: Happy birthday, here’s a baby! (KFYR-TV)

For more on this story go to: http://consumerist.com/2014/05/12/woman-gives-birth-in-walmart-parking-lot-on-her-birthday-with-help-from-fellow-shoppers/