Our calendar has 365 days on it. Which would be fine, but it takes the Earth just a little bit longer than that to make a full orbit around the sun.
That’s why we have leap year every four years, and that’s why this Thursday we’ll see Feb. 29 on our calendars.
It’s an occasion that got WWJ’s Zach Clark wondering: What’s it like to be a “Leap Day baby,” and what would happen if we didn’t have leap years? He finds answers to both those questions on a new Daily J podcast.
Julie Kai is gearing up for her 40th birthday on Feb. 29, but she says she’s much more excited to say she’s turning 10.
“I’m like dreading turning 40, but I’m like, ‘I can turn 10. I’m good. I can do that,” she said.
Kai gets “age appropriate gifts” every time she has a leap year birthday. For her “third birthday” (age 12), she got diapers and pacifiers.
“My sixth birthday, I went to Disney World because that’s what every 6-year-old wants to do. I was 24,” she said, noting she had a Barbie-themed birthday the year she turned 28.
Jamie Hilliard, a teacher, also has a Leap Day birthday, and she says she loves telling her students they’re older than her.
“It’s just a fun conversation starter and kinda blows their mind a little bit that they’re technically all older than me as far as how many birthdays they’ve had,” she said, noting her household likes to joke that her kids, ages 13 and 15, are actually older than her.
While Leap Day babies love to have fun with their birthdays every four years, there’s actually a scientific reason behind it — it takes about 365 and a quarter days to orbit the sun.
So what would happen if we didn’t observe Leap Day every four years? Clark asked Dr. Steven Cundiff, a physics professor at the University of Michigan.
“Our calendar would drift with respect to the seasons. The simplest way to put it is, eventually, we would have winter in July,” Cundiff said. “Basically, after 700 years, if we didn’t have the Leap Day, it would be adrift so that the summer and winter would be opposite, and twice that, it would come back again.”
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