What’s it like to be a leap year baby? What happens when your leap year babies turn 21?
What are the odds of being born on leap day? Slim. So slim that leap baby Adam Piekarski decided to get his 7-year-old daughter to do the math with him to prove to her how special he is.
"Everyone that I’ve met that’s been born on a leap year seems special," he said. "I personally think they think differently and they see differently."
I got the sense that since leap year babies’ birthdays don’t exist most years, it’s almost as though they feel unmoored from the specific date they actually celebrate.
Some parents would want to make sure the child saw it as a cool and special thing, rather than a bummer that he / she had a birthday every four years," she said.
Are you turning 32, or 8? That’s the question leap year babies can’t avoid on their actual birthdays. Eden says she gets a lot of coloring books and crayons on her "real" birthday. People routinely tell Urbina that she looks old for her age (24, or 6.) And Espasito says the joke causes her fourth-grade students endless amusement – "we’re older than our teacher, blah blah blah," she puts it.
"I sometimes feel bad for the people that make the joke because they're trying to be nice, and they really think they are being original," Urbina said. "But it's actually a bit annoying."
For the most part, it seems as though leap day babies find it mildly amusing to compare notes with others in their exclusive club. Most of the leap year babies I spoke with said they knew one or two others, though several groups exist to unite people more broadly.
For all the hype around 21st birthdays, most of the people I interviewed didn’t have much of a problem with the precise date they chose. That meant, again in nearly every case, that these leap day babies all tried their luck on the 28th.
"Before my 21st birthday, I spent an exorbitant amount of time on Wikipedia to figure out when I could go out for a drink," Clifton told me.
Technically, bouncers should not let 21-year-old leap year babies into bars until March 1, but when Clifton tried her luck on the 28th, she didn’t meet resistance. Same goes with Espasito, who rushed to buy beer on the 28th.
Haney didn’t have a problem, either, until months after his 21st birthday. But one night, he went to a bar in his hometown, and the bouncer threatened to confiscate his license over the birth date listed.
Evidently, the bouncer hadn’t ever heard of leap year.
"He was positive it was a fake ID and was real proud of himself that he had caught me," he said. "He thought I was the idiot for having a fake ID that didn't even have a real birthdate on it."
Haney recounted trying frantically to explain the concept of leap year to the bouncer, while the bouncer started bending his ID in half. Thankfully, a waitress noticed the ruckus and rushed over to straighten things out.
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