Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After My Vacations? Practical Advice From A Parent
I wiped rain off my jacket sleeve and reached for my chipped oat latte as Lila pushed a crumpled fertility pamphlet across the table. It was a rainy Saturday in October, we’d met at our usual neighborhood spot that smells like burnt cinnamon and overbrewed coffee, and she’d just gotten home two weeks prior from two back-to-back trips: a month-long backpacking trip through Thailand she and her husband had saved five years for, and a week-long beach getaway with her college roommates after that. “Everyone’s telling me to wait at least three more months to start trying,” she said, twisting the edge of the pamphlet between her fingers. “We did everything right—we took the big vacations we wanted before we had a kid, we’re home now, and now everyone says I need to wait to get settled. Should I?”
I nodded, because I’d been in exactly that spot three years ago. My husband and I had squeezed in a two-week road trip through the Rockies and a week-long family Christmas trip to Mexico back to back, our own “couple of vacations” we’d promised ourselves we’d take before we started trying. My mom told me to wait six weeks to let my body reset from all the plane rides and rich food. My cousin, who’d had a miscarriage the year before, said I should wait three months to get my cycle back on track after travel stress. Even my coworker, who had two kids, said there was no point in jumping straight from vacation to morning sickness and unpacking chaos. I almost waited. But I was 35, I’d been waiting for this for years, and the thought of putting it off three more months when we’d already checked the big trips off our list felt silly. We started trying two weeks after we got home, and I got pregnant that first month.
It was messy, no question. I spent the first four weeks of my pregnancy sorting souvenirs on the floor of our guest room, eating saltine crackers between boxes because standing up for more than five minutes made me nauseous. My husband was still catching up on 600 unread work emails, and we fought for 20 minutes one night about where to hang the handwoven rug we’d bought in Oaxaca. I forgot I’d moved my prenatal vitamins out of my travel toiletry bag, so I missed three doses the first week. There were nights I laid awake thinking I’d messed up, that I should have waited like everyone said, that I was already messing this whole parent thing up before the baby was even born.
But what no one tells you is that the “settled” routine everyone tells you to wait for never really comes. If I’d waited three months, I would have gotten settled into my work routine just in time for a big new client project that would have kept me working 60-hour weeks for six months. If I’d waited for that to end, I would have decided to wait for spring instead of winter to have a baby, then waited for the promotion I was up for, then waited to close on the new house we were looking at. The list of things to wait for never ends after the vacations are done.
That doesn’t mean there’s never a good reason to wait. It’s concrete, simple: if you took any prescription medications for travel—like malaria prophylaxis, or certain antibiotics for traveler’s diarrhea—your doctor will probably tell you to wait a specific amount of time before trying to conceive, and you should follow that. If your trips were so high-stress that you’re still having trouble sleeping three weeks after getting home, or your cycle was already irregular before you left, waiting one full cycle to let your body adjust makes total sense. But the general advice that you need to wait months just to “get settled” after vacation? That’s just overblown.
If you do decide to start trying right after your vacations, there are small, easy things that make the mess way easier to handle. I tell anyone who asks to do three specific things. First, get all your vacation unpacking done within two weeks of getting home. Don’t leave half your clothes in suitcases or souvenirs stacked in the hallway while you’re waiting to see if you’re pregnant. Clutter makes any transition feel way more overwhelming, and you don’t want to be dealing with unpacking when you’re exhausted from early pregnancy. Second, keep one small, low-effort vacation habit to make the shift back to real life less jarring. For us, that was a 20-minute walk after dinner every night, something we did every day on our trip, instead of jumping straight into working late every night. It kept the good part of vacation around without keeping us from moving forward. Third, say no to one non-urgent commitment you’d normally say yes to for the first two months. I turned down organizing my community group’s spring fundraiser right after I got home, and that extra free space was a lifesaver when I couldn’t stay awake past 8 p.m.
Lila ended up calling her doctor that week, found out the medications she’d taken for traveler’s diarrhea were out of her system after two weeks, and they started trying. Last text I got from her, she was 12 weeks pregnant, and she’d just hung the woven wall hanging they bought in Chiang Mai above the crib. It’s not all perfect, she said—she still has a stack of unused travel guidebooks on her dining table that she hasn’t put away, and some nights she’s too tired to cook. But she’s glad she didn’t wait.
I still keep the chipped ceramic mug I bought on my road trip on my desk. My two-year-old dumps her crayons in it every morning, and I haven’t had a coffee out of it in six months. I never got that perfectly settled routine everyone told me to wait for, and honestly, I don’t think I ever will. But that’s okay. Vacations are for making memories, but the next part doesn’t have to wait for a perfect moment that’s never going to come anyway.
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