Leap Day

Leap Day, Peter Brouwer turns 56 on Wednesday. But if you count the times he’s celebrated his true birth date, he’s only turning 14. Brouwer is a Leap day baby. And like a lot of people born Feb. 29, he relishes the uniqueness of his birthday. He even thinks there’s an advantage to marking your real birthday just once every four years.

“We don’t have that psychological drama of being a year older every year,” said Brouwer, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is the co-founder of the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies.

In off years, Brouwer says, most Leap day babies — perhaps 80 percent — celebrate their birthdays in February “because they’re born in February. We call them strict Februarians.”

But Jennifer Whisnant of Greensboro, N.C., whose daughter Ava was born in 2008, says they “celebrate on the closest Saturday for a party, or on March 1st, which is technically when she would have been born had it not been Leap year.”

Birth certificates and most government agencies like Social Security use Feb. 29 for those born on Leap Day, but leaplings occasionally encounter bureaucratic difficulties using their true birth dates. Some computerized dropdown menus don’t include Feb. 29.

“My life insurance policy is for March 1 because their computer doesn’t support Leap day,” Brouwer said.

On Facebook, Anne McCarthy’s friends get a note Feb. 28 that her birthday is the next day. Then on March 1, “there would be nothing. So, unless it was a Leap year, friends would not see birthday reminders for the actual day,” said McCarthy, of Boston, turning 24 on Wednesday (in Leap time, 6).

There are no reliable numbers on exactly how many babies are born on Leap day, but statistically, the odds of being born then are the same as any other day.

“The law of averages means your chance of being born on Feb. 29 are one out of 1,461,” Brouwer said, explaining that 1,461 equals 365, or the number of days in the year, times four, plus one for the extra day in the four-year cycle. “We figure in the U.S., there’s about 200,000 of us, and in the world, about 5 million.”

There’s also no good way of definitively determining whether mothers with scheduled C-sections or induced births avoid or embrace Leap day.

Fewer babies are born on weekends in the U.S. than on other days, according to research by the National Center for Health Statistics, and since Leap day fell on a Sunday in 2004 and a Friday in 2008, birth numbers from those years don’t tell the whole story.

Famous Leap Day Birthdays

Famous Leap Day Birthdays, For a day that comes rarely to the calendar, Google has doodled a rare two-in-one doodle that commemorates not only the leap day but also the 220th birth anniversary of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini.

Since the leap years and leap days are usually associated with frogs, the leaping ambhibians, the Google doodle on February 29 has a number of frogs, all four of them.

The doodle is inspired by Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s famous 1816 comic opera The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia), one of the most performed operas. Of the four frogs in the scene, one is at the piano and the soprano is the only one leaping. The barber frog is Figaro and the frog getting a shave is Count Almaviva (Characters created by French playright Pierre Beaumarchais and The Barber of Seville is one of the three Figaro plays penned by him).

Rossini’s other famous operas include William Tell (1829), Semiramide (1823) and Cinderella (1817). Gioachino Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 (died November 13, 1868). The possibility of someone’s birthday falling on February 29 is 1 in 1461 (as four years including a leap year have 1461 days in total) that in turn calculates to a mere 0.068 per cent chance.

The Gioachino Rossini leap year Google doodle is the third leap year doodle in Google’s history. The previous two were put up on 2004 and 2008. There was no leap day doodle in the year 2000.

By our calculations this is the 1314th Google doodle since the first ever on for the Burning Man Festival back on August 30, 1998.