"No, I'm having a baby!" a woman inside yelled back.

Carr, a certified nurse's aide at Wahiawa General, shouted to her husband, Daniel, and entered the unlocked apartment to help Beckey Sabean — an Army wife whose husband is deployed in Afghanistan — in delivering a healthy baby girl in the Sabean's living room.

"Those two were a godsend," Beckey Sabean said. "He made sure I was calm, and she made sure the baby was OK. They were a great team.

"I would have freaked out if they weren't there."

Sabean has been living alone in the condominium since her husband, Jeff, an Army specialist, left March 25 for a deployment with the 125th Signal Battalion at Bagram Air Base.

Her water broke at 7:45 a.m. yesterday. She called 911 immediately, but the baby wasn't waiting for the ambulance.

"By the time I got down there, my wife was already delivering the baby," said Daniel Carr, a senior courier for Diagnostics Laboratory Services. "The delivery was unbelievably fast. I don't think it was two minutes."

Monina Carr took off the hospital scrubs she was wearing to catch the baby as it came out. She suctioned fluids from the baby girl's mouth and nose, cleaned her and wrapped her up.

"I gave her one of my baby's hats," said Carr, who is the mother of 4-month-old and 18-month-old sons. "She was beautiful. Everything was normal, no problems."

Sabean said she had seen the Carrs only in passing around the building before they came to her rescue yesterday.

"I'm very grateful for what they did," she said from her hospital room. "You don't expect anybody who you just say 'hey' to in the hallway to stop and help. It doesn't happen very much anymore. They stayed the whole time and made sure I was OK."

Alyssa Gabrielle is the Sabeans' first child. She weighed 6 pounds, 5 ounces and was 20 inches long with no health problems.

Sabean called relatives on the East Coast, and Jeff Sabean heard about his daughter's birth at 7 a.m. today Afghanistan time. Sabean will be in Hawai'i next month on a 15-day leave.

"I thank God that he kept Beckey and Alyssa safe through this," he wrote in an e-mail.

Neither the Carrs or Sabean think they'll remain strangers.

"I think we'll definitely know each other after this," Daniel Carr said. Monina worked the night shift at Wahiawa General last night and planned to stop by the maternity ward to visit Beckey and Alyssa.

Pre-labor problems kept Sabean guessing on her exact delivery date. "People kept making jokes, like, 'She's going to have the baby in the living room or in the bathroom,'" she said. "So when they asked where she was born, and I told them that it was in the living room, they all thought I was joking. And I'm like, 'No, I'm being serious!'"