When your birthday is once every four years
This year longtime Loveland resident Maxine Koskie will celebrate her 23rd birthday. But she is unlike others in their early 20s, having been born in 1932.
Several residents with leap day birthdays shared their thoughts on what it’s like to celebrate the birthday of Feb. 29.
Kamille Newman’s daughter Layla will be celebrating her second birthday on Thursday, turning 8 years old.
Layla Newman said she is excited to celebrate this birthday, adding she and her family will be staying at The Embassy Suites and going out shopping. She already got her birthday gift, though, in a pug named Lou, adding she has wanted a dog for years.
She said she thinks it’s special to have her birthday on Feb. 29. “I get to tell all my friends, and we get to laugh about (it),” she said, later adding she thinks it will be cool once she is older to be an age she passed years prior.
“It always catches people off guard when we tell (them) her birthday,” Kamille Newman said. “It is definitely a silly conversation starter.”
Kendi Knop, who moved to Loveland a few years ago when her husband got a job in the area, will be celebrating her 10th leap day birthday as she turns 40 this week.
“It’s so fun,” she said about having a leap day birthday, adding, though, it wasn’t as fun was when she was younger and her brother would tease her for being “younger” since her birthday came around only once every four years.
As she grew up, though, Knop said she used the occasion of her actual birth day to do something a little extra fun, like going to a trampoline park when she turned 7 — or 28 — and exploring caves in 2020 right before the pandemic started; she added she is still working on what she will do to celebrate this year.
“We use it as a reason to do something a little bit more fun than you would normally do on your birthday,” she said. “Because it doesn’t happen all time.”
Knop also said that soon all of her four children will have passed her in age, including her youngest son, who is currently 7 years old.
“He will turn 11 before I do,” she said. “That part is super fun.”
But Koskie, the nearly 50-year resident of south Loveland, may take the prize for oldest leap day
birthday among those in the area, as she will turn 23, or 92, today and has lived in her home along South Taft Avenue since the mid-1970s.
Koskie said over the years, she always thought it was fun to have a leap day