Leap day baby born Thursday in Warwick won't have a birthday for four years

WARWICK – Sidney Lee Bilunas joined rare company when she was born at 4:07 a.m. Thursday at Kent Hospital.

She joined the roughly 658 Rhode Islanders who were born on leap day, Feb. 29, the rarest of birthdays.

Sidney also joins her parents, Warwick residents Jessica Cullen and Brian Bilunas; brothers Christian, 19, and Grayson, 5; and sister, Reagan, 3.

The medical team predicted last year that Sidney Lee would be born on Feb. 29, which got her parents secretly hoping it would come to pass. "I mean, how cool is it to be born on a day that happens once every four years?” they told the hospital staff.

Sidney Lee tipped the scale at 8 pounds, 12 ounces, and she was 20.5 inches long.

Mom and dad will have to get ready to plan a super-huge blowout four years from now, when Sidney Lee celebrates her first birthday. And they'll have to decide when and how to celebrate in the off years.

Not to mention getting used to having a daughter who experiences time differently than the rest of us.

(The 658 estimate of how many Rhode Islanders were born on leap day before this year comes from multiplying the 0.06% of births from 1960 to 2023 that occurred on Feb. 29 by the state's population, as counted in the 2020 Census, of 1,097,379.)

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Leapling born Thursday at Kent Hospital in Warwick RI