Leap-year babies mostly appreciate their Feb. 29 birthdate

Gearing up to celebrate your birthday on Feb. 29? Chances are you've been asked more than a few times, and will be asked again, why it shows up on the calendar only once every four years.

But even the most basic explanation — that an extra day is added every four years to help keep calendars in line with the seasons — is often met with "a look of confusion," says Amy Perez, a medical records specialist in Augusta, Ga. To some, "it seems like this foreign concept."
Perez, who will be 28 on Wednesday (that's 7 in leap years) and other "leapers," "leapsters," and "29ers" can thank Julius Caesar for their situation. He adopted the leap-day concept from the Egyptians after figuring out that the quadrennial addition of an extra day could make a precise calendar, says Yury Grabovsky, math professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. "Precision was very important, because if you planted seeds at the wrong time of year, you might have famine on your hands."
The chance of being born on leap day is about 1 in 1,461, says Raenell Dawn, co-founder with Peter Brouwer of The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies (leapday.com), an online club that counts 9,000 members worldwide. The group says about 5 million people worldwide celebrate leap-day birthdays.
Views on leap birthdays run the gamut from awful to awesome, Dawn says: "There are families that will celebrate big time and those that won't even acknowledge (a birthday) until the leap day."
Katie Busch, 31 (her eighth leap-day birthday is Wednesday), says her paternal grandparents "were sticklers" about celebrating only every fourth year. "No leap year, no call, no cards, nothing," says Busch, of Pottstown, Pa. "They simply said, 'It's not your real birthday.' "
Having a leap-day birthday helped Perez learn to take a joke, she says. She recalls that more than once, when being "carded," she had to explain, "No, I don't have to wait until I turn 84 to drink."
It's not so funny, though, when computers aren't programmed to recognize her birthday. Perez can't use the automated test-results line at her doctor's office because it won't accept Feb. 29.
Marisa Wiktor, an anesthesiologist in Milwaukee, says that as a child, her parents let her choose her celebration date in "off years." She usually chose the 28th because "it was in the same month as when I was born," says Wiktor, 31.
She recently encouraged a friend, scheduled to deliver her baby by cesarean March 1, to consider delivering Feb. 29. Having a leap-day birthday is "always a conversation piece," Wiktor says. "If you have nothing else to talk about, you can always say, 'I just turned 8.' "