Luke and Hillary Gardner never have a problem remembering each other's birthday, reports the AP, as the husband and wife were born the same day. And so was their son, 27 years later this past December. The odds of that happening are about one in 133,000, statisticians say. And that's a lot less likely than getting hit by lightning sometime in your lifetime, which some put at roughly one in 12,000. They weren't aiming at a joint birthday when their son Cade Lee Gardner was conceived, said Luke Gardner, an assistant pastor at a Baptist church in northeast Mississippi and a student at a nearby campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. "I really didn't even put it together until we got pregnant," he said. "Then we realized, 'Oh, wow!'" Using a smartphone app, he said, his wife calculated a due date of Dec. 15, three days before their joint birthday.
Her obstetrician called it for Dec. 19. So the couple from Baldwyn, Miss., got in some exercise to try to hurry the baby up. The night of Dec. 17, Gardner said, "we went walking." Whether or not that sped things up, Cade was born at 10:01am on Dec. 18—exactly 27 years after his parents. "Hillary is exactly six hours older than me," Luke Gardner said. She was born at 8:10am on Dec. 18, 1989. The chance of meeting someone born the same day as you is one in 365, explained Tumulesh Solanky, math chair at the University of New Orleans. The Gardners' feat is about 1/365 times 1/365. "That comes out to .0000000751—seven zeros and then 751," or about 7.5 in a million, he said, which comes to about one in 133,000. Jokes Luke Gardner: "If we have any more kids, if we don't get pregnant in March, we'll have to wait till the next year." (More birthday stories.)