Learning to drive before their 5th birthday? The story of two RI girls who took a leap.

Kayleigh Mason will be celebrating her fourth birthday at the end of the month, and, like everyone her age, she's looking forward to getting her learner's permit and getting behind the wheel.

"My friends can't wait for it, too," Kayleigh told The Providence Journal, adding that her friends tell her, "When you can drive, you're bringing us all in your car. You're taking us to Starbucks and Chipotle."

Raya Rishe, born one minute after Kayleigh at Women & Infants Hospital, also is looking forward to her fourth so she can get a job.

"On my birthday," Raya said, "I'm going to apply to Burlington."

Meanwhile, it seems like decades that Cindy Elder has been waiting for her Sweet 16 to roll around. “All kinds of good discounts are going to be coming my way before too long,” she told The Journal.

"I'm about to turn 20," said Pieter Vanderbeck. The retired janitor, who was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, is looking forward to his weekly hike at Lincoln Woods State Park as a way of celebrating.

For these four, and dozens of other Rhode Islanders, birthdays are a rare occurrence to be celebrated with gusto every time they roll around. They only get one-fourth the number of birthdays because they were born on Feb. 29, leap day, which is added to the calendar every four years. That means people born that day don't have a birthday the other three years.

That also means they experience time differently than the rest of us do.

“You begin to think about time in a different way, instead of just this incremental passage of time every year,” said Cindy, of Barrington, who knows she'll turn 64 when she celebrates her 16th birthday. “It does soften the blow of aging, because there’s a little sense of humor about your birthday, and you realize it’s really not so serious. And then there’s this delightful part about creating confusion about when your birthday is.”

What's it like having Feb. 29 as a birthday?

"It's just different," said Kayleigh, of Providence, a student at E3 Academy. "Everybody has normal birthdays. I just get one every four years. And I just have fun with it." And she added, for the people who will be born this Thursday, "Your birthday's special. Just enjoy it. Because not very many people get to have that birthday."

“Often on leap years, you open up the newspaper and you read a story about the poor leap year children who only get a birthday once every four years," said Cindy. "Every time I look at those stories, I think they have it wrong. It’s actually the greatest birthday in the world. And it gets a lot better as time marches on, because, for instance, when I turned 50 I didn’t have a birthday. It’s not divisible by four. How great is that? You don’t even have to acknowledge it.”

"When it's close to my actual birthday, I'm glad I was born on the 29th," said Raya, of Pawtucket, a sophomore at Tolman High School. "The three years I don't have a birthday, it's kind of awkward, because people don't know how to celebrate."

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“It’s a delightful birthday to have,” Cindy, executive director of the Barrington Land Conservation Trust, summarized. “There’s something about having a birthday that a lot of people don’t understand that allows you to think of yourself as different, in a good way.”

And, Pieter, of Providence, points out that leap year alters the time between birthdays for everyone. "Everybody else doesn't have their birthday on the same day either."

Do people born on Feb. 29 have a sense of humor about it?

While Kayleigh enjoys many of the leap year jokes people make, she does have one complaint: "When people use the same jokes over and over again, it's annoying."

"Once in a while I make a joke about being a quarter my age," said Pieter, adding that that can prompt others to joke. "They'll make a comment about: I'm still a baby."

That happens to Raya, too. "When I do immature stuff, they say, 'What are you, 3?' And I say, 'Yes.'"

When do people born on Feb. 29 celebrate their birthdays?

Obviously, their birthdays are celebrated Feb. 29 in leap years, but in the off years, the four who spoke to The Journal have different strategies.

Raya celebrates on Feb. 28 with one parent and on March 1 with the other.

Kayleigh celebrates during the 24 hours from noon on Feb. 28 to noon on March 1.

Pieter said he moves it around: "One year it's on the 29th; two years it's on March 1, and one year it's on the 28th."

Cindy tries to milk as much out of it as she can: “I generally encourage a sense of confusion, so people can celebrate me whenever they want to.”

Is Feb. 29 a rare birthday?

With the exception of three years every 400 years, when there is no leap year in years that are evenly divisible by 100, Feb. 29 occurs only once every 1,461 days, much less frequently than the once every roughly 365 days for every other birthday.

From Jan. 1, 1960, to Dec. 31, 2023, 874,034 babies were born in Rhode Island, according to the state Department of Health. Of those, only 547 – just 0.06% – were born on Feb. 29. That pales in comparison with the 2,286 – 0.26% – born on Feb. 28 and the 2,438 – 0.28% – on March 1.

Including 1960, there were 16 leap years during that time. On average in those leap years, 34 babies were born on Feb. 29, while 36 were born the day before and 39 the day after. Certain birthdays can generally be intentionally chosen – or avoided – through the scheduling of elective Caesarean sections or use of methods to speed up or slow down labor. That could account for that difference. Interestingly, during five of those 16 leap years, Feb. 29 births exceeded the average of Feb. 28 and March 1 combined.

For one of the people who spoke to The Journal, that's exactly what happened, although not so much to choose a Feb. 29 birthday. Cindy Elder's mother, Barbara Hail, had begun labor, but it looked like Cindy wouldn't arrive until March 1. And Hail's doctor had to leave for a conference that day, so he offered Hail the opportunity to speed things up. Hail didn't want an unfamiliar doctor to deliver her baby, so she chose to have Cindy on Feb. 29.

Why is 2024 a leap year?

Leap day is a calendar oddity, added once every four years so that the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which takes about 365¼ days, stays in sync with the calendar year, which normally is 365 days.

(The year is actually 365.2422 days long, so a few more adjustments are needed: Even though it meets the requirement of every four years, there is no leap day in years that are evenly divisible by 100, except when they’re also evenly divisible by 400, which is why 2000 was a leap year but 2100 won’t be.)

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Julius Caesar began the concept of leap year in 46 BC to keep annual festivals in the same season each year, but the modern standard of using AD years evenly divisible by four wasn't adopted until 1582, under Pope Gregory XIII. The Gregorian calendar also introduced skipping leap year in three out of four century years.

So, because 2024 is evenly divisible by four, but not a century year, it's a leap year, and Thursday will be Feb. 29, leap day.

What do you call someone born on Feb. 29?

Several of the people interviewed by The Journal refer to themselves as "leap year babies," and the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies, a website run by people born that day, offers a bunch of additional terms, including: "leaper," "leapean," "leapy" and "leapster."

The society also adds the specialized terms of "leapling" for newborns, "leap dude" for males, and "leap chik" and "leapette" for females.

For leap year babies, big parties four years ago, then disaster

The Rhode Islanders born on Feb. 29 experienced their last birthday like no one else.

While the leapers were partying on Feb. 29, lab technicians were busy processing tests on a 40-year-old man who had been hospitalized the day before with a respiratory illness. Then, on March 1, 2020, health officials announced: The lab test was positive, and the COVID-19 pandemic had come to Rhode Island.

"It was me and a bunch of my dance friends," Kayleigh recalled about her third birthday festivities that year. "We were just playing games and having fun."

But then the fun and games ended. "It was weird just being stuck inside for months."

"Just think about the timing," said Cindy. Her 15th birthday, which marked her arrival at age 60, was a big blowout, with lots of friends from throughout her life. "It was fantastic. And one week later, the world shut down. We’d had that incredible moment, when we hugged each other, we laughed with each other, we were all together in the same room. And, for many of my friends, it was the last time we saw each other for more than two years.”

She expects to get together with pretty much the same people this year, but she'll spread it out over a number of much smaller gatherings. “I feel like, number one, I don’t want to trigger another pandemic by having a party.”

A Feb. 29 birthday keeps them forever young

“There’s something kind of neat about being 16 again," said Cindy, "because 16 was a time where ... everything seemed possible and everything seemed confusing.”

Or, as Pieter sees it, "I have all my life refused to grow up."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Leap day birthdays are special celebrations for these Rhode Islanders