'Leapers' Celebrate Their Quadrennial Birthdays Today

This morning, all across the globe and even here in Columbia, residents awoke, reveling in the fact that they get to celebrate their "real" birthdays for the first time since 2008.

Leap Day babies, as they call themselves, have to settle for blowing out birthday cake candles either on Feb. 28 or March 1 most years but look forward to leap years when they get to celebrate the Feb. 29 anniversaries of their births.

Columbia resident Linda Potsiadio, in a brief email to Columbia Patch, said that it's "lonely but fun being a Feb. 29th-er."

The self-described "Leaper" was born in 1948, which, according to Leap Day tradition, makes her 16.

Baltimore County resident Jessica Long, a Paralympic gold-medal swimmer, was born Feb. 29, 1992.

Now 5 in "real" birthdays, Long, then 12, teased that she won gold medals at the International Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004 as a 3-year-old.

The Leap Day birthday club is a small one, with an estimated 200,000 members in the United States and about 5 million worldwide, according to an article in The Washington Times.

What the group lacks in size it makes up for in organization.

The Honor Society for Leap Day Babies is an organization of about 10,000 members that serves to bring those with Feb. 29 birthdays together — if only in cyberspace.

Cofounder Raenell Dawn prides herself in her knowledge of quirky Leap Day trivia.

Born Feb. 29, 1960, Dawn is the oldest of three sisters born in February, but the only Leap Day baby in the family.

As a child, Dawn wasn't aware that her birthday didn't appear on the calendar every year, she wrote in an email to Patch.

And when it did appear, she doesn't recall any extra special celebrations.

With three children with February birthdays, the family often picked one date to celebrate all three, she said.

Dawn has coined a phrase to describe the angst suffered by Leap Day babies: Empty Box Syndrome, or EBS.

"In the years that are not Leap years, our name goes into an empty box with no number," she wrote, referring to printed calendars. "Our name cannot go in the box with the number 28, and it cannot go in the box that holds the  number 1. (THAT will NOT work. We were born in February.)

"No. Our name goes into the Empty Box. Blank. No number. No 29. No representation. Nothing. Just our name in a ... big …. empty....... box......... (commence breaking down here)."

She can joke as an adult, but said having a Leap Day birthday was confusing as a child and caused more than a little teasing from classmates.

Dawn also brings up the debate of whether to celebrate on Feb. 28 or March 1 in non-Leap years.

Dawn is in the camp of celebrating Feb. 28 because that's the month in which she was born, not March.

Others celebrate March 1, with the theory that they would have been born that day had it not been a Leap Year.

Leaper Victoria Couch said in an email to Patch that, as a child, her family celebrated her birthday on Feb. 28, March 1 and also celebrated her "half-birthday" on Aug. 29.

Now a 6-/24-year-old, she celebrates on Feb. 28 in non-Leap years.

Aside from the inconvenience of not having a "real" birthday each year, there are some hassles and legal issues that accompany having a Feb. 29 birthday, according to Dawn.

Some computer programs do not recognize Feb. 29 as a legitimate birthday, which can result in having the wrong date of birth on important documents such as drivers' licenses and insurance policies.

But confusion, teasing and legal issues aside, Leap Day Babies revel in the specialness of their club.

"I have embraced my birthday as a defining characteristic of myself and proudly share the oddity of only celebrating every four years," Texas resident Joanna Dyess wrote in an email to Patch. "I look forward to turning 6 this year and going through my preteens again in the years to come."