Feb 29, 2020 4 min read

The odds of being born on Feb. 29 are pegged at 1 in 1,461.

Those are long odds, but not as long as the odds of becoming a movie star (1 in 1,190,000), becoming an astronaut (1 in 42,000) or going to the emergency room after a golf cart accident (1 in 22,355). Estimates have it there are 5 million “leaplings” wandering the earth, with about 187,000 of them in the United States.

Mildred Parkinson is one of them. Today, the resident of Strabane Woods assisted living facility in South Strabane Township is planning on marking her 96th – well, actually, her 24th birthday – with family and friends.

“I always celebrate on March 1,” she said. “When I was born, the doctor said, ‘We must give her a birthday.’ So, my mother was given a choice. Since I came late at night, she chose to take March 1, since that’s coming in like a storm.”

Parkinson is one of a handful of people in the area who have a birthday on Feb. 29. She hopes to be around in another four years so she can celebrate her 100th birthday on Feb. 29, 2024.

“And I’m entertaining pretty good health,” she noted.

Patti Matthews of Strabane was born 48 years after Parkinson, on Feb. 29, 1972, and will be celebrating her “12th birthday” today. Having been born on Leap Day is “actually kind of neat,” she said. Some people who were born on Feb. 29 say they occasionally have trouble with official documents or people forgetting that Feb. 29 is tacked on to the calendar every four years, and insisting that the date they list as their birthday is wrong.

According to Matthews, “Some people will say, ‘Are you sure it’s not the 28th?'”

Jason Humphries of Monessen was born four years after Matthews, on Feb. 29, 1976, and has never chosen a specific day on which to celebrate when it’s not a Leap Year, but “I usually do it on which day I am off.”

Humphries steers clear of big celebrations, and keeps to a dinner and cake with family, “then going out with some good friends for a night on the town.”

Shannon Roupe gave birth to her son, Chance Roupe, on Feb. 29, 2008, at Washington Hospital. She was one of two mothers in the hospital who had children that day, and she was so caught up in the whirlwind of giving birth that she didn’t even realize that it was Feb. 29.

“I didn’t even know it was Leap Year,” she recalled.

Most years, they celebrate his birthday on March 1, because “he wasn’t born on Feb. 28, so I don’t feel like it’s his birthday,” Roupe said.

How does Chance feel about being a leapling?

“He actually likes it,” his mom said. “He’s figured out that he can technically tell people he’s only 3. He gets a kick out of it.”

The choice of whether to celebrate on Feb. 28 or March 1 in non-Leap Years is something that every leapling has to confront. Patty Laur, a Bethel Park native, said she opted for Feb. 28, because “I always felt like a February girl.”

Laur plans special celebrations every Leap Year. For instance, when she turned 40, she hosted a pajama party, with family and friends wearing pajamas while they feasted on pizza and chicken nuggets.

On a trip to China about 18 years ago, her Feb. 29 birthday raised the eyebrows of customs officials.

“As I handed the two Chinese officials my passport and paperwork, they looked at each other and commented on my documents,” she recalled. She began to panic and asked what was wrong.

“In very careful English the one man said, ‘Leap Year Baby,’ pointed to my passport and laughed,” Laur continued. “We all did, and it was fun to see this unique birthday didn’t go unnoticed, even in China.”

Leap Year is a feature of the modern Gregorian calendar. An additional day was added to the year every four years in order to keep calendars synchronized with the seasonal or astronomical years. John Lowe, a retired engineer with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told National Geographic, “It all comes down to the fact that the number of the Earth’s revolutions about its own axis, or days, is not connected in any way to how long it takes for the Earth to get around the sun.”