Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple Vacations? What We Learned Planning Our Family Timeline
I’m sitting on a wicker balcony on our last day in Puerto Vallarta, salt crusted on my calves from that morning’s surf, mango juice dripping down my wrist onto a faded blue sarong. My husband is dozing in the chair next to me, a half-empty beer sweating on the rail, and a mariachi band is drifting up from the beach below. I scroll through my camera roll and stop on a photo I took an hour earlier: a young couple a few yards down the sand, their 10-month-old sitting between them covered in granola and sand, all three of them laughing so hard they’re leaning into each other. When my husband wakes up, he asks what I’m staring at, and I say, “I still don’t know. Should we just start trying, or wait for that Europe trip we keep talking about?”
Two years ago, when we got married, every person over 30 pulled us aside to say the same thing: travel all you can now. Once you have kids, it’s over. No more lazy mornings, no three-hour dinners with wine, no spontaneous 10-mile hikes. You’ll be stuck at home with sippy cups and nap schedules forever. We bought into it, mapped out a plan: two big vacations before we started trying, that was our number. A two-week Iceland road trip the first year, this two-week beach trip the second, then pull the plug on birth control. It felt like a solid, reasonable plan.
Halfway through that Iceland trip, though, the plan started to feel flimsy. We were hiking a trail along a glacier, and we passed a young couple coming the other way. The dad had a one-year-old strapped to his chest, the mom had a diaper bag slung over her shoulder next to her daypack, and they were stopping every ten feet to pick wild blueberries. The baby was purple from chin to chest, grunting and shoving handfuls into his mouth, and both parents just looked relaxed. I expected to feel that little rush of “thank god that’s not us right now,” but I didn’t. I felt a soft twist of want. That night over fish and chips at a tiny pub, I told my husband, and he just shrugged and said, “We already planned the two trips. Let’s just stick to the plan.”
Back home after Puerto Vallarta, I started asking around to people I trusted who’d made different choices. My sister has two kids under five, and she waited four years after marriage to start, did five big international trips before her first. She told me she pushed starting back two years longer than she actually wanted, just because she kept hearing that travel would be impossible once she had kids. She loves the photos from those trips, but she says she wishes she’d trusted that she was ready earlier, instead of checking boxes no one made her set. My friend Lila got pregnant two months after her honeymoon, never got that big second trip, and she brought her six-month-old to Costa Rica a year later. They didn’t do the 10-mile rainforest hike they’d planned, because he napped for two hours every afternoon in the rental stroller. They just sat on the porch and drank coffee while he played with a pack of plastic toys, and she said that trip was still one of her favorites. It was different, not worse, she told me. No one mentions that part.
I brought the question to my OB at my annual checkup a week later, because I’d half wondered if there was some hidden medical reason to wait after travel I didn’t know about. She laughed and said the only time you need to delay pregnancy after a trip is if you’ve visited an area with high Zika risk, and even then it’s only a few months. For any regular vacation—road trips, beach trips, European city breaks—there’s no medical reason to wait. Your body doesn’t need to “reset” after a vacation, she said. That’s not a thing. That was a big relief, because I’d secretly been worrying about that for months with no good reason.
Sitting with all these different stories, I started to see that the whole “check off all your travel before kids” rule is just a default that doesn’t fit everyone. If you’re not ready to start trying anyway, and you want to take a bunch of trips, that’s great. But don’t keep waiting just because you hit the two-vacation mark everyone talks about and feel like you need a third, or a fourth, to be prepared. If you’re on the fence, there are small concrete things you can do to figure out what you want. I did a weekend cabin trip with my sister and her two-year-old a month before our beach trip, and that cleared up a lot of my fear. I saw that we still got to sit by the fire and drink wine after he went to bed, we just ate dinner an hour earlier and packed a whole extra cooler of goldfish crackers. It wasn’t the end of fun, it was just different. That’s way more useful than listening to people tell you how hard it is. I also sat down and wrote a quick list of what I actually wanted, not what other people said I should want. After two trips, I realized I wanted to start trying more than I wanted that Europe trip. I just felt like I had to wait for it because that was the plan.
We didn’t end up picking a hard yes or no. We just stopped using birth control, and we’re leaving it open. If I get pregnant in the next six months, we’ll push Europe back a year and bring a baby along with us when we go. If it takes longer than that, we’ll go this summer like we planned, and that’s fine too. I don’t have a neat answer for anyone else. Some people need two vacations, some need five, some need zero. The only wrong call I can see is waiting longer than you want just because someone told you your fun ends when you have a baby. That’s what we were doing, for a while, and it took me two trips and a lot of talking to other people to see it. Right now, this open-ended thing is working for us. We don’t know when it’ll happen, and that’s okay.
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