Babies jump into world on Leap Day 2016
Feb. 29 won’t come around for another four years, but proud parents will never forget birthday of newest sons and daughters
New London — Amanda Lawton hadn’t even thought about a Leap Day baby until her grandmother noted that if she delivered nine days past her due date, the newborn would share the distinction of a birthday that technically only occurs about every four years.
“I was thinking, nine days overdue, that’s way too much,” said Lawton, of Uncasville, who delivered 7-pound, 6-ounce Chase James Manning at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital at 6:21 a.m. Monday, making her third born a “leaper” or “leapling,” the nickname for people born on Leap Day.
“She’s mad at him because he took so long to get here,” joked Chase’s father, Zachary Manning, when Lawton suggested that perhaps she’d wait to host Chase’s first birthday celebration until 2020, when there will be another Feb. 29.
Leap Day babies were born at Lawrence + Memorial and The William W. Backus hospitals Monday, including 6-pound, 11-ounce Marlee Rae Beech, whose parents will not have to worry next year whether to celebrate her first birthday on Feb. 28 or March 1.
“We are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so we don’t celebrate birthdays,” said Marlee’s mother, Tammy Rae Beech, from her room at Backus, where she was resting after the birth with her husband and Marlee’s father, Michael Beech.
“It’s biblical, there are reasons in the Bible,” she explained, but added she finds the Feb. 29 date interesting and believes when her daughter is older she will be able to have some fun with it.
“When people ask why she doesn’t celebrate her birthday, she’ll be able to say, ‘Well, I don’t have one,’ “said Beech, of Dayville.
And most years, that will be true.
One Leap Day is added every four years with the exception of centenary years such as 1900 and 2100. The point is to keep the calendar in agreement with the planet Earth’s revolutions around the sun. Without the leap days, over time, summer would bump into fall and fall would run into winter, and so on.
Authorities on the topic explain that it takes the Earth about 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds to circle the sun. Without the extra day every four years, over the course of a century, the calendar would be out of whack by 24 days. And that would play havoc with the seasons.
Julius Caesar first introduced the concept of leap days but the modern calendar we follow today was the work of Pope Gregory XIII, who in in 1582 introduced the Gregorian calendar, which is more accurate.
But much of that was lost on the parents of the babies born Monday, who were both jubilant with their newborns and intrigued with their unusual birthday.
“It’s going to be four years before she’ll have her actual birthday on her birth date,” said Ashley Evans of Groton, whose baby Harper Lynn arrived at 2:34 a.m., weighing in at 7 pounds.
Evans, who has two sons at home, said she searched the Internet after the birth and found out that Leap Day babies get perks like free pizzas and doughnuts at some establishments.
“It is unusual,” she said, and added that in 2017, she’s already leaning toward hosting Harper’s birthday celebration on Feb. 28 “because I will be so excited that it’s her first birthday. And I’ve always wanted a girl and she’s just perfect.”
Liz Davila of New London, whose 8-pound, 8-ounce baby boy Eliezel was born with a full head of black hair at 1:19 a.m. Monday, said she wasn’t ready to lock in a birthday party date for next year quite yet.
“But it will be a big celebration, even bigger now,” she said, explaining that she had told her family she wouldn’t deliver on Feb. 29, and “This is what I get. A special boy.”
Davila has two more boys and a girl at home, and she said the older siblings are excited to welcome their little brother home. Eliezel’s father, Kenneth Luciano, and other relatives gathered in her room Monday afternoon to mark the baby’s Leap Day.
The new Leap Day babies might want to know some leap trivia when they get older. They will be able to tell friends that there are two other names for a leap year — a bissextile or intercalary year — meaning there will be 366 days, not the typical 365.
And although already discounted, they can say that in the old days, people would say that babies born on Feb. 29 tended to be be sickly and hard to raise, but without solid evidence, those musings were dismissed as old wives’ tales years ago.
And then there is this. It’s said that on a Leap Day, a woman has the prerogative to ask a man to marry her, a tradition said to be linked to a Scottish law passed in 1288.
The next Leap Day will be Feb. 29, 2020.