Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Couple Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Breakdown
The ice on my iced oat latte was half-melted, and Lila was propping her smudged-screen phone against the salt shaker to show me photos of her and her partner’s hike outside Porto. We’d been talking for 20 minutes about everything from her new job to her cat’s urinary tract infection, when she locked her phone and leaned across the table, voice dropping like she was asking for something shameful. “So. We decided we want to start trying for a kid next year. But we already have two vacations booked this year—this one in Portugal, then the hiking trip to Colorado in September. Everyone keeps telling me we shouldn’t wait. Should I?”
I nodded because I’d been exactly where she was eight years ago. My husband and I had talked about starting a family, we’d saved a down payment for a house, we had good health insurance, everything lined up on paper. But we’d been putting a $50-a-month chunk of change into a Japan trip fund for five years, ever since we got engaged, and we’d booked that trip six months out. We also had a small road trip planned around the Olympic Peninsula for our fifth anniversary, two months after we got back. So we had a choice: cancel both, start trying that month, or wait 10 months and go.
All the comments we got were the same. “Fertility doesn’t wait, what if it takes you years?” “You can always go when the kid’s older.” “Why put it off?” I went to bed every other night for a week overthinking it, scrolling through infertility forums at 1am, feeling guilty for even wanting to go.
We ended up going. I called my OB first, asked her straight up if waiting 10 months was a bad idea for a 31-year-old with regular cycles and no family history of fertility issues. She laughed and said “Unless you have a reason to rush, go eat sushi and sleep in. Ten months isn’t going to change anything for you.” So we went. We walked 12 miles a day through Tokyo, ate sushi at 11pm after a day of museums, got lost in the Kyoto bamboo groves and didn’t have anyone asking us for snacks or needing a nap every two hours. We camped on the coast in Washington and fell asleep to the sound of waves without a monitor next to the bed. I got pregnant three months after we started trying, and had my son nine months after that.
I’ve thought a lot about that choice since, because I get this question from almost every friend of mine who’s getting ready to start their family. A lot of people frame it as being selfish for prioritizing vacations over a baby, but that’s never made sense to me. The first thing I tell people is to get clear on your own facts first, not what your cousin’s roommate or TikTok says. Book a 15-minute pre-conception appointment with your doctor, write down your questions, and get a straight answer about what waiting 6 to 18 months means for your specific body. If you’re over 35, have irregular periods, or have a family history of fertility struggles, that answer might be don’t wait. If you’re healthy with no red flags, that answer is almost always that a short wait isn’t going to hurt anything.
The second thing I tell people is that if you do decide to wait, pick a hard stop date and write it down somewhere you’ll see it. It’s easy to keep adding more trips, more big plans, and push trying back years without meaning to. For us, that date was October 1, and we stuck to it. We didn’t add another big trip after that, we just moved forward. That’s a small thing, but it keeps you from accidentally straying from what you actually want.
I have a friend who skipped her planned two-week trip to Costa Rica to start trying. She got pregnant two months after she canceled, and she told me last year, seven years later, that she still thinks about that trip every time she sees a photo of the rainforest. She loves her kids more than anything, but she said it’s the one “before baby” choice she regrets. After I had my son, our first family vacation when he was 1 was a long weekend at a lake house an hour from our house. I spent half the time chasing him around the dock, the other half washing mashed sweet potato off my shirt, and we didn’t have a single conversation that lasted more than five minutes without someone needing something. That’s not a bad thing—that’s just what traveling with kids is. Vacations before kids are the only time you’ll get to have that kind of unrushed, just-the-two-of-you time for a really long time. If you’re lucky, you’ll get that back when they’re older and moved out, but that’s decades away.
I don’t brush off the fertility fear. My cousin struggled with infertility for six years before she had her kids, and I know that for some people, every month matters. That’s why the first step is always talking to your doctor, not taking random advice from a blog or a friend. But for most people who are healthy, a 6 to 12 month wait to take the trips you already planned and saved for isn’t going to change the outcome. You can adjust too—if you’re really on the fence, go on one trip this year, start trying after that, instead of pushing two trips out. There’s middle ground, no one says you have to pick all or nothing.
Lila left the coffee shop still a little tense, but she said she was going to call her OB that week to check in, and she was leaning toward keeping the trips. A month later, I got a text from her with a photo of her holding a golden, custard-filled pastel de nata on a Lisbon sidewalk, sun on her face, grinning. I don’t know how long it’ll take her to get pregnant once they start trying. I don’t know if she’ll ever look back and wish she’d started sooner. But I do know that when she’s up at 2am a few years from now, rocking a fussy baby and drinking cold coffee, she won’t be lying awake regretting that pastel de nata in Lisbon. That’s enough, for now.
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