Oh baby, what an extra special birthday!
Proud parents James and Carmen Weir can have no excuse for forgetting their children’s birthdays.
For their two daughters and their new son have all been born on May 1.
It is a remarkable coincidence that had mathematicians scrambling to work out the odds.
For those in the know the odds on it happening are 133,225/1.
Baby Joseph made his appearance at 10.59pm on Thursday, just after his sisters Ella and Megan had celebrated their sixth and fourth birthdays respectively.
And what made it all the more remarkable was that young Joseph - who weighed in at a healthy 8lb 1 oz - was actually two weeks late.
He could have been born at any time since the due date of April 17 but obviously decided to hang on until the day his sisters had been born.
“It’s certainly a huge surprise,” said engineer James, who will celebrate his 37th birthday on May 8.
“Ellla was born two weeks early and Megan was a day early so it was a remarkable coincidence that they both arrived on May 1.
“The date we were given for Joseph was April 17 but he showed no signs of arriving so Carmen arranged to go into hospital. We had planned to have him at home, as we did with Megan, whereas Ella was born in Calderdale.
“We booked into Calderdale Royal Hospital for him to be induced and did so on the day the girls celebrated their birthday.
“We waited until they had gone to bed after celebrating their birthdays and he arrived with a great deal of noise just before 11pm.
“He certainly let everyone know he had arrived but he has been fairly quiet since then”.
The couple, who live in Chapelgate, Scholes, will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary later this year.
Carmen, 37, is a full-time mum and arrived home at lunchtime yesterday with Joseph, much to the delight of Ella and Megan and other family members.
Carmen is originally from Manchester while James was brought up in Huddersfield and is now director of a small company.
James said: “The girls are really delighted and are looking forward to sharing their birthday party tomorrow with their new baby brother.
“Some of my colleagues at work Googled the odds on babies being born on the same day and came up with some amazing figure of 48m to one: I wish I’d had a tenner on that.
“But that’s definitely it. With having to wait that extra two weeks for Joseph it has been tense and certainly Ella has said she doesn’t want to share her birthday with anyone else”.
130,000/1? How is that worked out?
It would certainly have been worth a little flutter.
The odds on three children from the same family all sharing the same birthday are remarkable.
And obviously babies don’t always arrive on schedule so statisticians have to allow for so many variables.
Dr Simon Fletcher. a senior research fellow at the University of Huddersfield, confirmed the odds. “The probability of the second
child being born on the same day as the first is 1/365, and the chance of the third being the same as the second is 1/365 therefore the
chance of all three being the same is 1/133,225”.
Other experts have termed it in a different way, quoting figures of 7.5 per million, which mean that an average of 7.5 families in a million could see the children share a birthday.
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