When they are born, your heart begins a new turn.
When they are one, you teach them to have fun.
When they are two, their personality comes through.
When they are three, their independence starts to be.
When they are four, they learn the word more.
When they are five, curiosity comes alive.
When they are six, their stubbornness starts to kick.
When they are seven, they think they are eleven.
When they are eight, they try to debate.
When they are nine, their room will never shine.
When they are ten, then teen years seem to begin.
When eleven hits, they have got real good at throwing fits.
When they become twelve, their old toys go on the shelf.
When thirteen comes around, they always want to be in town.
When they are fourteen, they are hardly seen.
When fifteen is here, they are all a cheer.
When the next three years hit, they will hopefully be getting ready for life a little bit.
Then eighteen is here, school is in the past,
Hopefully their learning will help their life be a blast.
“Live by this”
Go straight, be strong, help others along.
Be true, be free, share your love with others and me.
Teach those in need, don’t give in to greed.
Build the life you want, but those with less don’t shun.
Times can get hard, love and patience can pull you through.
Keep love in your heart, and know like you love, someone loves you.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.