Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? Practical Truth for New Parents
Cold coffee sweats on my kitchen table, a half-eaten goldfish cracker crumb wedged in the seam of my laptop, and a lopsided sun sticker peels at the edge of the window above the sink when the notification pops up from our neighborhood mom group: “Me and Jake just got back from our second big trip this year—we’ve been saving to check these off before we start trying, but now everyone’s saying we should wait another year to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations. Am I being selfish for wanting to just start already? Or should I hold off?”
I lean back in my chair, twist the chipped rubber band around my wrist that my son made me at art class, and smile. Three and a half years ago, that was me typing that exact question into a different group chat, voice shaking a little.
My husband and I had just wrapped up a 10-day road trip from Portland to San Francisco, stopping at every weird roadside winery and empty beach we stumbled on, no itinerary, no alarms, just stopping when we were tired and eating tacos for dinner every night. Two months before that, we’d done a week in Mexico for a friend’s wedding, spending whole afternoons napping on the sand and drinking margaritas before 3pm. When we got home, my aunt called right after we unpacked, and her first line was, “You two just had all this fun. You’re gonna be miserable stuck at home with a baby. Wait another year, take that big Europe trip you’ve talked about, get all that travel out of your system first.”
I sat on our porch that night, grease from a takeout pizza box on my jeans, going back and forth. What if she was right? What if we had a baby, and I’d look back at those photos and resent that we’d given up that freedom too soon? What if I didn’t wait long enough, and regretted it forever? On the other hand, I was 32, my mom had struggled to conceive her second baby at 33, and I was ready to stop planning every month around trip dates and birth control schedules. I scribbled a pros and cons list on the back of the pizza receipt, and I still have it taped inside my junk drawer today.
When Lila came over for iced coffee a few days after that group post, she brought her golden retriever puppy and said the exact same worry my aunt put in my head: what if those two vacations are the best time of our lives, and a baby will just ruin everything? I didn’t give her some big speech about how motherhood is the best adventure. I just pulled out that old pizza receipt and showed it to her.
The truth I’ve figured out since having my son is that the idea you need to “get all travel out of your system” before having kids is a myth people repeat because it sounds right. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to wait, though. I told her the two concrete questions I ask anyone who asks me this now, instead of giving a yes or no answer.
First, ask yourself: are these two vacations the big ones you’ve been dreaming of for years, or is there a non-negotiable trip you still haven’t taken that you know you won’t be able to do for at least five years after having a baby? If you’ve spent a decade daydreaming about hiking the Inca Trail, and you know you can’t do that pregnant and it’s way too hard to pull off with a toddler or preschooler, then wait, go take that trip. No one’s saying you have to rush. But if the “one more trip” everyone’s pushing you to take is just a random extra vacation someone suggested, that’s not a good enough reason to put your plans on hold.
Second, write down the three things you think you’ll miss most about traveling without kids, then figure out how you can get those same things in small doses after baby comes. For me, the top thing I thought I’d miss was sleeping in until 10am. So we worked out a system early on: my husband gets up with our son every Saturday morning, they go get donuts and play at the park down the street, and I sleep in until 9:30. It’s not 10am on a Mexican beach, but it scratches that itch. I thought I’d miss spontaneous, no-plan days, so we started doing 2-hour spontaneous ice cream runs after dinner on weeknights, and day trips to the lake on Sundays when our son is up early anyway. Those small things add up more than people think.
We started trying three months after that last trip, got pregnant first try, and I don’t regret it for a second. That doesn’t mean I never miss the old days. Sometimes I’m folding laundry at 9pm after our son has finally gone to bed, and I see that photo of us eating tacos on that empty Northern California beach, and I think, it was nice to just sit and talk for two hours without someone yelling “MOM” every 30 seconds. That’s okay, it’s normal to feel that way. It doesn’t mean I made the wrong choice.
Last week, Lila texted me a photo of her and Jake at the local apple orchard, their puppy curled up in the back of their pickup truck. They decided to start trying next month. Her text said, “The big trips were fun, but we’re ready. If we hate it, we can save up for a trip without the kid in five years, right? It’s not like it’s impossible.”
I texted back that she was right. This morning I opened my junk drawer for a rubber band and saw that old pizza receipt again. The last thing I wrote on the con side of waiting was, “I don’t want to look back in 10 years and wonder what we were waiting for.” That’s still true. There’s no one right answer for everyone, but if you’re ready to start, you don’t have to keep waiting just because you already checked a couple of dream vacations off your list.
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