Should I wait to get pregnant to take a couple of vacations first? What one parent learned
The steam from my morning oat coffee was curling into the frost-fogged kitchen window when Lila’s text popped up. I’m 28, we have the savings for two back-to-back trips next year – Portugal in spring, a mountain cabin in fall – but everyone says if we want kids, we shouldn’t wait. Should I hold off on getting pregnant just to take the vacations first?
I stared at that text for a minute, because I’d typed almost the exact same question into Google five years ago. My husband and I had just paid off our last student loan, and we’d been stashing cash for two trips we’d dreamed of since our first date: a two-week hike through Japan’s countryside, and a long weekend at the Florida beach house my grandma had owned since the 70s, where we could just sit and do nothing. My mom told me I was being silly, that I’d never want to travel once I had a baby anyway, and waiting was just risking trouble conceiving. My older sister, who had her first kid at 24, told me to go, that I’d regret never getting that alone time with my husband before we became mom and dad. No one gave me a straight answer that fit me.
We ended up taking both trips, then started trying six months after we got home. I have a four-year-old now, who dumps half her cereal on the floor every morning and insists on bringing three stuffed animals everywhere we go. I still pull up photos from that Japan trip when I’m waiting for her to get out of preschool, and I don’t regret the choice we made for a second. But I also know it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we’d done it the other way around.
Last month, I was at a playground playdate with my friend Mia, who got pregnant three months after she got married, never took that big European trip she’d planned. I asked her if she regretted it. She pushed her daughter’s swing, watched a group of kids chase a squirrel, and said no. They do weekend camping trips every spring now, and the kids love it, and they’re planning that European trip for when the youngest is in high school. It’s just different, not worse. The only thing she regrets is letting other people pressure her into skipping it when she really wanted to go.
That’s the part no one talks about when you’re asking this question: there’s no universal right answer, but there are concrete things you can do to make the choice that’s right for you, instead of going with what your cousin or your Instagram feed says you should do.
When Lila met me for coffee a few days after that first text, she pulled out a crumpled notebook with a messy pros and cons list scribbled in the margins. I told her the first thing she should do isn’t ask a bunch of other parents, it’s call your OB and get actual facts about your own body. If you’re under 30 with no known fertility issues, waiting 12 to 18 months for two trips isn’t a big risk for most people. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had past issues with endometriosis or miscarriages, ask your doctor about getting a simple baseline test to check your ovarian reserve, that’ll give you actual numbers instead of generic internet scare stories. That’s what I did, and it took a lot of the anxiety out of it.
The second thing I told her is to be honest about what these trips actually are. If these are two once-in-a-lifetime trips you’ve been saving for for years, the kind you can’t really do with a baby or a toddler in tow (looking at you, 10-mile daily hikes through mountain temples), that’s a different thing than two random weekend getaways you could take any time in the next five years. Our Japan trip wasn’t something we could just push off 10 years – my knees already don’t work the way they did 10 years ago, even now, and I’m glad I did it when I could walk all day and eat street food at 10pm without worrying about a kid’s bedtime. But if one of the trips is that cozy mountain cabin she’s planning, that’s easy to do as a babymoon, or even a first family trip when the baby is six months old. She could even do the Portugal trip next spring, start trying after that, and push the cabin trip a year, instead of waiting for both to start trying. That’s a middle step that a lot of people don’t mention.
And don’t buy the myth that you’ll never get to travel again after you have kids. That’s just not true. I travel with my daughter at least twice a year, and it’s fun in its own messy, loud way. It’s just not the same as traveling with just your partner, when you can do whatever you want whenever you want. That kind of unstructured, all-about-you trip doesn’t come back easy once you have kids, and it’s okay to prioritize that if that matters to you.
One thing I wish I’d heard sooner is that regret works both ways. You can regret waiting to get pregnant and having trouble conceiving, but you can also regret skipping the trips you really wanted and always wonder what that time would have been like. The point isn’t to pick the “perfect” choice, it’s to pick the choice that leaves you with the least amount of “what if” for your own situation.
Lila ended up deciding to take both trips next year. She talked to her OB, who said for her, waiting 12 months is low risk, and she was able to do a small egg freezing cycle that her insurance partially covered to ease her worry. She’s already booking her hotel in Lisbon, and she texts me photos of restaurant reservations she’s saving. I don’t know how things will go for her – she might get pregnant right away when she starts trying, or she might have a harder time than we expect. But right now, she’s not lying awake at night wondering what if she’d skipped those trips. That’s the best any of us can do, really.
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