Printing madness and McGuffy Primer Lesson 16

Can I just say that I truly hate printing? Not printing, as in using one of these...

No, I'm thinking more along the line of, printing as in the opposite of cursive. It truly is the bane of writing. I literally do not know how to size them.  I also don't know how to space them and I don't know how to make them look right without loops... I'm TERRIBLE with printing. 

Back when I took the SAT, we all had to sign something along the lines of, 'I didn't cheat on this test, this work is my own,' with our signatures on the bottom, and it had to all be in cursive. I breezed through it, not even really thinking about it. But there was this one guy...clueless. Utterly clueless. Our test was in a middle school and along the top of the wall around the room there was a list of all the letters in cursive. And this poor, embarrassed guy had to literally sit there, and write a little bit, look up, write a little bit, look up, write a little bit, look up. More. Times. Than. I. Can. Remember. Because he had no idea how to write in cursive. Oh, and he ran out of room, too, because he was writing so big. Pretty much, everyone was laughing at him because it should not have taken him nearly five minutes to write one sentence and his own name.

Now that I'm having to practice my printing, I am seriously feeling like that guy from my SAT test. I know how to do my basic printed letters, so I'm one step beyond him, but I feel like I'm failing at it as I'm writing. I have no idea how to size or space my letters when they are not connected. I'm sitting there, as I'm printing my letters going, 'how on earth do I size these things?! And how far apart should they be??!" Truly, truly humiliating.

And with that out of the way, here is Lesson 16. And yes, I did actually do the printing practice.

Lesson 16 Practice words are; big enough for you to read on your own. I wrote them enough times myself already. 

And here is my own work. My only comfort is that it's getting better. Oy vey. 

  

The Yellow Flower

I have always liked flowers. They're very lovely. However, I can't smell them unless they're very strong. Actually, I can smell very little, and as for skunk, I can't smell it at all. So, this does lead to some hilarity. When I was little, we used to live near a big pond, where I used to play. It was a nice, deep pond, shaded by trees that were reflected in its murky depths. I used to hunt for frogs, tadpoles, and minnows under the boughs of hemlocks, and cedars. I'd sit on the little, rotting dock, and watch as the cedar and hemlock needles swirled around the posts holding up the dock as I crouched waiting for a bullfrog tadpole to come close enough for me to grab. Many tadpoles wisely stayed out of reach as they nibbled on the algae covered posts. Frustrating things. I did catch some when I was little and raised them in a terrarium to froghood. Surprisingly, no matter how big or small the tadpoles were, they always came out looking like normal frogs, not the monstrous giants I expected. Along the banks of the pond, near the muddy edges, I found some plants with big green leaves and some large yellow blossoms which looked a little like yellow calla lillies. I thought they were quite lovely and I picked one for my mum. I took it home to mum where I proudly presented it to her. And then...my brother exclaimed very loudly that my flower stank and that I had to take it out of the house. And then I discovered just what flower I had picked. I had picked...a skunk cabbage. Yes, I had picked a flower that smelled like a skunk and had brought it into the house and given it to my mother and stared at her hoping she would be delighted with it. My mother had the grace to thank me for the flower before tossing it out. I still have no idea what skunk smells like. Go figure.

These, in case you were wondering, are NOT skunk cabbage. These are callla lillies.

 Shockingly enough, I can't smell them, either, but my Mum and I are BOTH allergic to them. So, Skunk Cabbage or Calla Lilly, the story would never have ended well.