TH UR SDA Y , F E B R U A R Y 25, 2016
COUNTY WIDE YOUR HOME AND FAMILY NEWS FROM ALL OF KENDALL COUNTY
Frankie and Lexi Szot were born on Feb. 29, 2000, 19 minutes apart.
KendallCountyNow.com
Unusual milestone
Leap year twins’ ‘4th’ birthday is on Feb. 29, 2016 By CHRISTINE BOLIN DASCHER cbolin@kendallcountynow.com
Frankie and Lexi Szot, a pair of sophomores at Plano High School, are about to turn 4 after waiting 16 years. The twins were born on Feb. 29, 2000 – in a leap year. Since a leap year is something that only happens once every four years, they are officially getting ready to celebrate their fourth birthday. As excited as their mother, Deanne Henle, was to have twins, she was hoping they weren’t going to be born on Feb. 29. The twins, however, had other plans and arrived five weeks earlier than expected. “I did not want them born on Leap Day because I thought it was a generic birthday. I wanted them to actually have an actual birthday,” said Henle, who has been in Plano with the twins, husband Mark and three other children – Mackenzie, Liam and Olivia – since 2008. Once Henle realized Feb. 29 was non-negotiable, the next step was making sure both babies were born on the same day. Frankie arrived first at 10:41 p.m. Lexi came 19 minutes later. She missed the twins having separate birthdays by exactly one hour. “After Frankie, I was exhausted,” Henle said. “The doctor said, ‘If you don’t bear down and start pushing, they were going to have two totally different birthdays.’ I didn’t want that either. I thought it would be confusing if they had different birthdays.” Fortunately, the twins shared a birthday and were healthy. Frankie measured in at six pounds and 18.5 inches while Lexi was four pounds, 12 ounces
Photos provided
Frankie and Lexi Szot are going to turn 16 – or 4, depending on how you look at it. The sophomores at Plano High School are leap year twins and were born on Feb. 29, 2000. and 17 inches long. According to leapyearday. com, the chance of being born on Leap Day is 1 in 1,461. There are approximately five million people in the world and 200,000 in the United States born on Feb. 29. The odds of having identical twins, however, born on this day are 1 in 500,000. There are currently 1.5 million sets of twins who were born on Leap Day. By the time the twins were about to celebrate their first
birthday, Henle wasn’t exactly sure at first how it was supposed to be done. She eventually thought it would be best to celebrate it on two different days – Feb. 28 and March 1. That’s how it was done for every nonleap year. “I felt like I was cheating out of a day that might have been theirs, so that’s how it’s been,” Henle said.
See LEAP TWINS, page 3