Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The maple syrup on the table was already sticky by the time our toast arrived, and Lila had pushed her half-eaten avocado around the edge of her plate for 10 minutes before she asked the question. It was the question she’d been tiptoeing around for an hour, ever since she mentioned she and Jake had started talking about trying for a baby: “Should we wait? We have these two vacations booked already—Pacific Northwest road trip this fall, Cabo with my family next spring. Everyone says we should get them out of the way before we get pregnant.”
I sat back and stirred my cold coffee, because I’d been exactly where she was seven years ago. My husband and I had booked a 10-day trip to Patagonia two years before we got married, locked in the rates, reserved the mountain huts, planned all the day hikes. We got married, decided we were ready to start trying, and two weeks before our departure, the test was positive. I cried in the bathroom for 20 minutes. I scrolled every fertility and travel forum at 2 a.m., read dozens of comments that said we’d ruined both the trip and the pregnancy, that I was being selfish risking the baby for a vacation. My sister said we should just cancel, get a refund, wait until after the baby was born. That’s what everyone would tell you, right? Check all your boxes first, get all your fun in before the life of diapers and early bedtimes starts.
We went anyway. My doctor said there was no reason I couldn’t go—low risk, no complications, just take it easy, don’t push myself on the hikes. So we adjusted the itinerary. Instead of doing 8 to 10 mile hikes every day like we’d planned, Matt would leave early in the morning, do the big climb, and meet me back at the valley lake by 1 p.m. I’d bring my beat-up paperbacks, sit on a flat granite rock by the water, suck on lemon drops to keep the morning sickness at bay, and watch condors circle the jagged peaks. It wasn’t the trip we’d planned, but it was quiet, it was ours, and nothing went wrong. Three months later, we went to New Orleans for his best friend’s wedding, I was 12 weeks pregnant and couldn’t keep anything down but crackers and iced tea, so we skipped the bar crawl after the reception, sat on our hotel balcony eating beignets we’d bought that morning, and watched the streetcars rattle by. Again, not the plan, but still good.
I have another friend, Sarah, who waited three years to start trying after she and her husband took their two dream vacations. They went to Italy, they went to Thailand, they checked every box off their list. By the time they started trying, Sarah found out she had diminished ovarian reserve, and it took them four years of IVF to have their first kid. She still says that if she’d known, she would have started trying earlier, adjusted the trips to work around the pregnancy, instead of waiting. That doesn’t mean waiting is always the wrong choice, of course. Another friend of mine waited a year to do her big European backpacking trip before trying, she was 28, no fertility red flags, she’d dreamed of that trip since she was a teen, and it worked out fine for her. She got pregnant two months after she got back.
What I’ve learned from all this is that most of the advice out there is one-size-fits-all, and it doesn’t actually ask you what you need. The first concrete step I tell people to take is to go talk to your own doctor first, not the internet. Write down all your questions: can I fly? Can I hike? Can I spend all day on the beach? Most of the time, for low-risk pregnancies, the answer is yes to all of that, even early on. If you have risk factors, your doctor will tell you what you need to adjust, and you can decide from there, instead of trusting a random stranger in a Facebook group who had one bad experience.
Second, pull out your phone notes and write down the two non-negotiable things you want out of each of your vacations. Don’t just go by the generic idea that you “need” a kid-free trip before baby. Lila pulled up her itinerary when we were at brunch: her non-negotiables are stopping at all the tiny coffee roasters along the Oregon coast, walking on the beach at sunset, and seeing the old redwood groves. None of that requires you to be not pregnant. If her non-negotiable was multi-day backcountry hiking with no cell service, that’s a different story, and it would make sense to wait. Most of the time, the things people actually want out of a pre-baby vacation are just time with their partner or family, not the extreme stuff you can’t do pregnant.
Third, stop buying the idea that you’ll never get to take a nice trip again after you have a baby. Yeah, travel changes. You won’t be able to spontaneously book a last minute weekend trip and stay out until 2 a.m. exploring the city. You’ll have to pack more stuff, you’ll have to plan for nap times, and sometimes the whole thing will feel like more work than it’s worth. But you can still travel. My daughter is 5 now, we’ve taken her to the beach, we’ve taken her camping, we’ve taken her to visit my family across the country. We’re already planning to do that big Patagonia day hike I missed when I was pregnant when she’s 12, which feels like a way better trip anyway, honestly. It’s not lost forever just because you don’t do it before you have a baby.
Last week, Lila texted me. She and Jake decided they’re going to start trying this month, they’re not going to wait. They adjusted their road trip itinerary to add more stops for stretching and more coffee breaks, and her cousin in Cabo already offered to get her a pregnancy-safe pineapple margarita when they’re there. I told her that sounds perfect. I don’t know how it’s going to go for her. Maybe she’ll get pregnant right away, and the trips will be totally different than she planned. Maybe it’ll take her a year to get pregnant, and she’ll get to do both trips non-pregnant anyway. There’s no perfect answer, no guarantee either way. But I do know that waiting to start the thing you actually want just to check two trips off a list isn’t the guarantee people make it out to be.
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