A ONE in two million event happened twenty years ago on February 29, when Wonthaggi local Cloe Booth was born.
Cloe was a leap day baby. Otherwise known as a leaper, leapling or leapster.
The probability of being born on a leap day is 0.00068 per cent or a one in 1461 chance, with only about five million people sharing the rare date as a birthday.
Yet, more amazing than this, is that Cloe’s Mum, Helen Booth, was also born on a leap day.
The odds of both mother and daughter both being born on a leap day are one in two million!
This year, Leap Day will fall on Thursday, February 29 and Cloe and Helen will, for the first time in four years, have the opportunity to celebrate on their actual birth dates.
And they are both hitting big milestones.
Cloe will be celebrating her 20th birthday and Helen will be celebrating her 60th birthday, or some would say they are celebrating their fifth and 15th birthdays.
They will celebrate the rare occasion together with friends and family at The Wooli Tavern.
When Cloe was born, the pair were set to be featured on the front page of the Herald Sun but got bumped to page two after another story broke.
Cloe now has her own daughter, Isabella Poppy, and while Isabella doesn’t share the leap day birthday, she was born on the significant date of November 11, Remembrance Day.
Leap days exist to keep calendar days in sync with the Earth’s trip around the sun.
Earth completes its orbit around the sun in 365.25 days, but is rounded down to 365 for practical purposes, resulting in an error of almost 0.25 days, or almost six hours, per year.
An extra day in February is added to account for four extra 0.25 days and only 0.7 per cent of the world’s population are born on the special day of February 29.
