An extra day for all, a special birthday for a few
Pictured: Red Rhythm coordinator Nicole Nothe and previous sponsor. Monday evening, Red Rhythm dancers gathered for one final event at the end-of-year banquet. This is bittersweet for senior lieutenant Sophia Reeves. “I get sad knowing it’s the last moment we will have as a team,” she said.
February 28, 2020
A typical western calendar has 365 days on it, but the sun actually takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds to make a complete revolution around the sun. This slight difference led to the creation of the Leap Day every four years to keep the calendar on track.
That’s the case on Saturday.
And while most people get to celebrate their birthday on the date they were born, for those born on Feb. 29, their official birthday comes once every four years.
That’s the case for Red Rhythm director Nicole Nothe as she is set to celebrating a milestone birthday on Saturday.
“It’s a love and hate relationship because it’s fun because it’s something different, and it’s a different conversation to have with people when they ask what your age is,” Nothe said. “I’m turning the big 40 this year, so I’m just saying I’m 10, because I don’t want to come to the real world where I’m 40, but them it also can stink because I don’t have a real birthday for three years.”
One of just an estimated 0.07 percent of the world’s population has a Leap Day birthday which can be confusing to explain.
“It makes it interesting, you get a thousand questions all the time,” Nothe said. “People don’t understand, so you have to explain the calendar to them, so that takes a lot of work to explain over and over again, but it’s fun.”
Facing not only confusion from the general public, Leap Year birthdays can lead to issues with government documentation as the wife of boys’ soccer coach Fred Kaiser can attest to.
“[The worst part is] trying to explain to people, mainly government workers,”Samantha Kaiser said. “They have to systematically plug in your birthday and it doesn’t exist every year.”
Even though her birthday has brought some unusual challenges, Kaiser has made the best of her unique situation.
“I think it’s cool to be different from everyone else. It would be even cooler if I actually didn’t age but every leap year though,” Kaiser said. “I celebrate every year, usually on [Feb.] 28th, but growing up my mom would always let me pick whatever day of the week I wanted. I usually pick Fridays.”
