Batavia Leap Day Baby Can’t Decide What’s Weirdest About Her Birthday

BATAVIA, IL — When Amber Jirsa shares the story of her birthday, people aren’t quite sure which is weirder — that Jirsa was born on leap Day, or that she was born in the back seat of her grandmother’s Ford Pinto, the “little carefree car,” it was billed, but proved to be anything but.

“They don’t make them anymore because they explode,” Jirsa explains to her Batavia High School English students, who weren’t born when the last of subcompact cars rolled off the assembly line in 1980.

The detail spices the already interesting story of Jirsa’s birth on Feb. 29, 1984, one she shares with her students every four years.

“They’re curious about how it works when you don’t have a birthday every year,” Jirsa told Patch.

Jirsa said that in 2020, a student asked her,“Aren’t you just 4?”

No, she answered, she was 9 by leap year calculations. The student responded, “You’ve accomplished so much to just be 9 years old.”

Her students also gleefully take note that they’re “older” than she is by several years. So do her oldest children, who are now 14 and 12. Her youngest, who is 3, will catch up, too.

“When the older two were in middle school, they liked seeing the reactions when they told people their mom was 8 or 9 years old,” Jirsa said. “It also has happened where I have been the same age as my older two, and that is always fun.”

This year, Jirsa will be 40, or 10, on leap day. She shares her birthday with only about 5 million people worldwide. The chances of being born on leap day are about 1 in 1,461.

“It is special because I find that so many times, I am the first person people have ever met with this birthday,” she said. “It is always interesting to see the reaction of people.”

Jirsa said she’s only met three other people with leap day birthdays, a fellow leaper from her childhood, and a couple of students in schools where she’s taught.

A Race To The Hospital

But back to Feb. 29, 1984.

Jirsa’s mother, Angela, was a few days overdue. Her father, an over-the-road truck driver, had been “waiting and waiting and wrong and had to get on the road again to make some money.”

Angela went into labor the next day. Their small town of 3,600 was about an hour away from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Jirsa was supposed to be born. With Angela’s brother at the wheel and her mother playing midwife in the back seat, they rushed toward the hospital, stopping once at a gas station to use a pay phone and let the hospital know the baby had been born.

Jirsa interrupts the story long enough to point out that her students are often as unfamiliar with coin-operated phones as they are with Pintos. “When I first started teaching, I didn’t have to explain as much, but now I do” as phone booths and pay phones disappear from our collective experience.

There had been no complications. Both Jirsa and her older sibling had been born rather effortlessly, the older child born at a hospital but barely. Jirsa thought that would bode well for when she had her own children, but that wasn’t the case. With her own experiences so much different, Jirsa marvels even more at her mother’s easy labors and her backseat birth.

When she was 3, Jirsa’s family moved to Dallas and then 10 years later Las Vegas, where she lived until she was 20. She attended the University of Nevada, then moved to Illinois to attend Benedictine University. She attended Columbia College, Chicago for a time before getting her undergraduate degree from Aurora University, and then returned to Benedictine to get a master’s degree. Jirsa was paying her own way, so getting her education took a while.

Jirsa has been a teacher since 2011, at Bolingbrook High School before joining the Batavia High School staff in 2015. Last February, she was named 2023 North Suburbs Regional Teacher of the Year by the Illinois State Education Board.

Jirsa’s mom always made a big deal of her birthday when it fell on leap day. A limousine would pick her up from school. It was “the coolest thing ever,” Jirsa said. From there, they would find a restaurant with leap day specials.

“That’s always fun,” she said.

Being a leap day baby is an advantage in “truth or lie” parlor games, Jirsa said. She can claim, for example, that she got her driver’s license when she was 4. The year she turned 21, the Feb. 28 celebration was a bust. It wasn’t a leap year, so she would have to wait another day until March 1 to make the milestone birthday purchase of an alcoholic beverage.

While she mostly celebrated on her birthday on the 28th in non-leap years, occasionally the celebration was expanded another day to March and “I got the best of both worlds,” she said.

This year, Jirsa will celebrate with her husband, Matt, and their children; her mother, Angela Jackson, who lives in nearby Naperville, and other family members and friends at a kid-friendly space at the top of Sturdy Shelter Brewing in Batavia.

“I just want to be surrounded by family and friends,” she said. “It’s a really good time to play on the 10-year-old thing.”

Who knows, Jirsa mused. She may even wear a birthday crown.

Whatever happens, there is “lots of pressure on my husband at this point,” she joked.