TORONTO -- As thousands of babies born at the start of the year 2000 prepare to turn 20, one family remembers their roadside birth experience.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1999—a night when some thought the world would end, but for Natalie McDonald, life was just beginning.

“I remember nothing,” McDonald told CTV News Toronto, but her parents do.

“New Year’s Eve, in the morning, I got up and I decided I was not going to go in to the year 2000 still being pregnant,” Natalie’s mother Heather Sinclair-McDonald said.

At the time she herself was a labour and delivery nurse, but admits she didn’t realize that she’d gone in to labour inside their Mississauga home.

“I just wasn't able to step outside of myself and recognize that I needed to get to the hospital.”

After a back and forth with her husband, he threatened to call an ambulance and she agreed to head to the hospital, choosing to travel to St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto where she worked. With little to no traffic on the highways and with fireworks going off along Toronto’s waterfront as they drove, the couple raced along the Gardiner.

“We got to roughly between Kipling and Islington going east and I felt a lot of pressure, so I told him I felt like something was happening and the baby was coming out,” Heather said. “He pulled over to the shoulder and slipped my pants off and once the pants came off my water broke and the head came out with black curls.”

Heather’s other daughter, Natasha Smiley, was in the back seat of the car at the time. She ended up taking the phone from her father, who had called 911.

“I just remember turning to Tisha in the back to take the phone to have a conversation with 911- and as I did that, the head came out in my hand, and that was pretty much the end of my usefulness at that point,” said Wayne McDonald, Heather’s husband.

In the 911 call, which was released at the time of the birth, Natasha can be heard walking through the birth with a dispatcher.

Natalie was born healthy, and rather uniquely, on the side of the Gardiner Expressway, just minutes in to the year 2000. Nearly 20 years later, the family still laughs as they recall their New Year’s Eve ordeal.

Natalie’s grandmother calls the experience “crazy”, while Natalie herself agreed.

“I think if that was me, I’d lose my head.”

At the time it was front page news and newborn Natalie was featured on multiple television newscasts. About to celebrate her 20th birthday and now a university student in Alberta, Natalie says her unexpected entrance at the start of the new millennium is still a story she hears every year.

“I guess it’s kind of cool” she admitted. “Even though I don’t remember.”