Kites Are Fun!

A sunny Saturday in late April brought around 100 youngsters and parents to Escondido Park in Lamar for the HOPE Center’s Kite Flying day and free BBQ, sponsored by Healthy Places.  It was nice to see so many kids, on the early side of their teen years, to be without a cell phone for a few moments, or thumbing text messages all morning long.  If you didn’t bring a kite, you could also try your skills with a hula hoop, test your aim with an archery contest or help yourself to an orange or apple and a bottled water while you were waiting for your hamburger or hot dog to be grilled.

Byron Hall from the HOPE Center said quite a few kids made their own kites, “We had a class at the Lamar Library the night before and the kids followed the instructions for putting theirs together.”  The archery contest featured arrows that were equipped with a large Styrofoam bulb as a point, taking aim at a burlap bulls-eye about 40 feet from their line in the grass.  There were as many Robina Hoods as there were Robins, testing their archery skills for prizes.  The donated hula hoops came right out of a box from the Whammo Company, with kids coping with either just one around their waist, or as many as seven or eight, seeing how long they could keep the hoops moving on their hips.  Contests to see who could keep their hoop hula-ing the longest were planned for later in the afternoon.

Anthony LaTour was a stand-out among the crowd, literally, as from his BBQ command post, atop a flat bed pick-up, and amid a swirl of smoke, the HOPE Center volunteer was flipping burgers as fast as the crowd was devouring them.  A little more wind would have been ideal for kite-flying, but the kids got the hang of it, either running their kite into the air from a short string, or laying their kite on the ground and playing out all the twine, waiting for a gust to pick their kite up off the ground and letting it soar into the blue spring sky.  The turn out for this second annual kite-flying event was considerably larger than the first one the year before.

Perhaps on a not-so-distant breezy Saturday, a couple of kids will leave their cell phones behind, grab their kites from their closets, and find some open field where they can enjoy a little sunshine and enjoy a fun was to get a little more exercise in their lives.  There’s nothing to prevent an older adult from getting their own kite and joining them.

By Russ Baldwin