By KYLE MARTIN, Hernando Today, Florida

Published: February 29, 2008

Your birthday is a special event - one day set aside each year to honor your presence on the planet.

But what if you didn't have a birthday every year?

Imagine people dismissing your driver's license as a fake because of the date of birth inscribed on it.

Picture an "invalid birth date" window popping up on your computer whenever you fill out a form online.

It's these types of things that lead Peter Brouwer, co-founder of the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies, to declare: "We get no respect."

About 200,000 Americans share Brouwer's complaints because their birthday falls today, Feb. 29, or as it's known, "Leap Year Day."

To get a grasp on the basics of the leap year, we start with the sun.

For everyday purposes, primary school basics tell us that it takes 365 days - a calendar year - for the Earth to circle the sun.

But the precise amount of time is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Seems insignificant, but that extra time adds up over the years and eventually wreaks havoc with the months we naturally correspond with the seasons.

(Not that this has much bearing in balmy Florida, but the rest of the United States would be throwing snowballs in July).

Experts say this was recognized as far back as the Egyptians, but it was the Romans who first began adding an extra day every four years to their calendar.

That calendar was later replaced in 1582 with our modern Gregorian calendar, which adds an extra rule to the leap year formula.

To truly line up the solar and calendar years, a century year is not a leap year unless it is evenly divisible by 400. This eliminates three leap years every few hundred years.

The first time this latter rule came into play was the year 2000.

And so, every year four years, pregnant women are asked by their doctors, "Do you really want to put Feb. 29 on the birth certificate?"

Brouwer says it's worth the headaches and encourages "leapers" to embrace their unique birthday.

His Web site, leapyearday.com, even offers a shop where folks can buy gear emblazoned with snazzy slogans like "I celebrate mine on 2/29."

"We like to put a positive spin on it," Brouwer explained.

The extra day also puts a kink in the schedule of firefighters, who work 24 hours every third day.

Leap year essentially resets the clock for the shift that worked the previous Christmas and puts the holiday back on their schedule a second year in a row.

Some jurisdictions break it up and let each shift work eight hours, then pick up the normal schedule the next day. It's as if it never happened.

"It's crazy how it works out," said Jason Brazinski, union president for Hernando County Fire Rescue.

Reporter Kyle Martin can be reached at 352-544-5271 or kmartin@hernandotoday.com