Here is how he looks, my last baby.

He’s a sprite, truly an angel child, charmingly verbal, from wearing “peekaboo dipes” to insisting that “all dinosaurs are babies.” He’s a kid with a grin for everyone, natural greeter at our front door, a kid who dances through his mornings.

And I’m joining up with him just in time, while he’s still round and soft as a plum, a little bear cub clinging to a tree.

I’ve decided dating these blogs just as my newspaper column ends, after 25 years, 11 in syndication. It was a good run – and almost a diary of my life. But it is this face you see here, this moment with this last-born of my five sons and two daughters,that helped me decide it was time to give up weekly journalism.

For all those years, the columns were a sort of diary of my family growing up – of my own growing up, for I was a grass-green twentysomething when I began. Atticus, however, does make me young.

He reminds me how life can begin again when it seemed to end – more than a dozen years ago when my first husband died young. I wrote a novel, then another, and now I’m putting the finishing touches on novel number nine and moving on to number ten.

As for children, there will never be another after this one. It’s not that I feel too old; but these – each of them – need one-on-one with both of us, me and my husband Chris, who married me and my kids nine years ago.

Long ago, when my son Dan, now 21, was young, I set aside an evening every two weeks for a date with each child. That’s a tradition I intend to take up again with my younger kids, who range in age from nearly 2 to nearly 12. And I’ll do the same with the older ones who let me.

The years since my husband died have been filled with not a little excitement, turmoil, acclaim, surprise, pain, abundant love and fear… but not enough silence, not enough privacy or quiet laughter or simple hours together.

That’s why I’ve decided to put on the brakes, in this one area of my life.

I’m going to lose some money. I’m going to lose some chops. But I’m going to gain just a little more of the one thing we can’t buy: time. I’m ready to pay out little more of the former to have more of the latter, before I turn around to ask myself, where has it gone?

You see, I’ve got a date with Atticus, to play dinosaurs.

I’ve got a date with his brother Will, to make a fort of blankets and chairs, with my husband, to talk politics and prairie flowers in the darkness of our room. I’ve got a date at college in Indiana with my freshman, to spend a few days buying him new tennis shoes and taking his friends out for a big restaurant dinner.

I’m not sliding into the slow lane. In fact, I intend to commit to my writing in a deeper way than I have before.

But some months ago, my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was named by USA Today the second most influential book of the past 25 years – second, that is, to Harry Potter.

And that’s how important my writing is to me.

It’s the most important thing, second only to one other. But much as I love it, it’s second by far.