Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacation? A Teacher and Mom Weighs In
The calendar on our fridge had two vacations marked in blue marker: a long weekend at a lake cabin in June and a week in the mountains in September. I stared at those dates almost every morning while making coffee, trying to decide if we should start trying for a second baby before or after both trips.
We’d been saying “soon” for about eight months. Then my sister-in-law announced she was pregnant, and suddenly “soon” felt like a decision. But every time I thought about actually planning a pregnancy, I looked at the blue marker and hesitated. How could I go to a lake cabin in the first trimester, exhausted and nauseous, while everyone else floated around on paddleboards? How could I fly to the mountains at twenty weeks and not be able to do the longer hikes?
I brought it up with two friends at a birthday party. One said, “Just go for it. There’s never a perfect time.” The other said, “Honestly, if I could go back, I’d do one more trip just the two of us first.” Both sounded right. Neither helped.
The question looked like it was about vacations. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it was about something else.
I teach first grade, and over the years I’ve watched a lot of kids go through the arrival of a new sibling. The ones who struggled weren’t the ones with a two-year gap or a four-year gap. They weren’t the ones whose parents had planned carefully or ended up surprised. The ones who struggled were the ones whose parents were so depleted that they missed the small signs. A kid who used to sleep well started crawling into his parents’ bed at 2 a.m. A kid who loved school started crying at drop-off. A normally chatty kid went quiet at the lunch table. It wasn’t deliberate. It was their way of saying, “I still need you, and I don’t know how to tell you.”
That changed how I thought about the question. It wasn’t really about whether I wanted to be pregnant on a hiking trail. It was about whether I had the energy to be present for the child I already had while my body and brain were busy growing another one. And that wasn’t going to be solved by moving a date on a calendar.
Still, I wanted an answer. So my husband and I talked about it in the car after a grocery run. He said, “I think we’re using the trips as an excuse. If it wasn’t the trips, it would be something else.” I said, “Maybe. But I also don’t want to sit at the lake feeling guilty because I should be enjoying this last sip of wine and I can’t.” He nodded. Then he said, “What if we just book the lake cabin for June and plan the September trip to be flexible? If you’re pregnant, we change the plans. If you’re not, we do all the hikes.”
That felt simple and terrifying at the same time.
Our neighbor, a father of three who somehow still mows his lawn at 7 a.m., gave us the most useful advice when I mentioned it while he was trimming his hedges. “There’s no perfect time,” he said. “But there are good enough times. Pick one and stop second-guessing.”
So we did. We sat down one evening and made a list of actual constraints, not vague worries. The June trip was a four-hour drive to a cabin we could cancel up to a week before. That was fine for any stage of pregnancy. The September trip was a flight, a rental car, and a booked itinerary with a lot of long walks. That was the harder one. So we called the mountain inn and asked if we could switch our reservation to a room with a small kitchen and a pool. They said yes. We changed the non-refundable hiking tour to a self-guided day that we could skip if needed. That tiny adjustment made the whole thing feel less like a sacrifice and more like a plan.
We decided to start trying after the June trip. I’ll be honest: it wasn’t a grand compromise. It was just the least overwhelming option. I told myself that if it didn’t happen by August, we’d stop planning around trips entirely and just let it happen whenever it happened.
Then we went to the lake. I remember sitting on the dock the first afternoon, watching a heron stand perfectly still in the reeds. I wasn’t pregnant yet. I drank a beer. I felt fine. It was a good weekend.
What happened next was not a clean story. I didn’t get pregnant that first month, or the second. By the time September arrived, I was not pregnant, and we went to the mountains with our seven-year-old and did every single hike we’d planned. I remember standing at the top of a ridge, wind in my jacket, feeling grateful that I wasn’t nauseous or exhausted. But I also felt a small ache in my chest, a quiet disappointment that it hadn’t happened yet. The trips were lovely. They also didn’t solve anything.
Two weeks later, the test came back positive. I found out on a Tuesday morning before work. I stood in the bathroom, holding the stick, and thought about all the planning we’d done. The deadlines we’d set. The careful conversations about caffeine and hiking boots and refundable reservations. None of it was wasted, but none of it had actually controlled the outcome. The vacation timing had mattered to me because it was something I could control. The baby was something I couldn’t.
When I think about what I would tell another parent standing where I was, I don’t say, “Wait until after the trips” or “Don’t wait.” I say: figure out what the vacation is really for. Is it to rest before your life changes? Then waiting a cycle is fine, and you’ll enjoy the rest more. Is it to prove you still have your old life? Then no trip will ever be enough, because your old life is already changing. And if you have a child already, ask yourself how you’ll handle their big feelings while you’re also dealing with a newborn. That’s not about whether you booked a flight. It’s about what you’ll do when your three-year-old starts acting out at bedtime because they need you and can’t say it. Are you ready to sit on the floor and let them cry? Are you ready to say, “You’re feeling really mad right now and that’s okay,” and stay with them even when you’re running on four hours of sleep? That’s the real question.
We’re now in the early weeks of this pregnancy, and the September trip is just a memory. The lake cabin pictures are still on my phone. I don’t know if we got the timing right. I suspect there isn’t a way to know that until years from now, when I see how our family actually settles. What I know for now is that the vacations were not the enemy. They were just places on a map where I kept trying to postpone a decision I wasn’t ready to make. Once we made the decision—out loud, in the car, holding a bag of groceries—the trips became what they were always supposed to be. A chance to pause. Not an answer.
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