Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? It Helped Us Find Our Own Answer
We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, a calendar spread between us. My husband had drawn little airplane symbols on the weekends we’d booked a place with friends in Santa Fe and a cabin with his parents in June. “If we try this month,” he said, “you’d be about eight weeks during the cabin trip.” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. We both remembered the last time I’d been eight weeks pregnant: exhausted, nauseous, unable to stand near a coffee maker without gagging. The idea of being that person on a seven-hour drive, stuck in a cabin with his mother, felt unfair to everyone.
I had just stopped breastfeeding our daughter, and my cycle had returned. Everyone kept telling me the “gap” between her and a future sibling was getting close to ideal. But we’d waited two years to take these trips. I didn’t want to give them up.
I called my friend Maya, a mom of three, and asked the question directly: “Should I wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations?” She laughed. “You’ll never feel ready,” she said. “If you wait, you’ll find another reason.” That answer annoyed me. But she also said something useful: “What do you think the vacations are for?”
At first, I didn’t know. I thought: because we haven’t had a real break since our daughter was born. Because we are tired. Because we keep saying we’ll travel more once the kids are older, and then the kids are older and sports schedules happen. The vacations weren’t just trips. They were proof that we were still us, not just a feeding-and-napping rotation.
I used to teach early childhood classes, and one thing I’d learned is that parents’ sense of being overwhelmed changes how they show up. It’s not the exact age gap between children that matters most. It’s whether the adults feel like they have enough emotional room to take on another baby. A few months of waiting wasn’t going to ruin a sibling relationship. But the resentment of skipping something I’d looked forward to for two years? That could linger. And an overtired, out-of-sorts parent is harder on a toddler than a larger age gap ever is.
So we did something practical. We sat down one evening and made a list of what the next year would realistically look like. Not a bucket list, just a calendar. We wrote down the vacations, the months my husband had major work travel, the weeks I had to help with the parent organization’s spring fundraiser, and the seasons when we had grandmothers available to come stay with us. We also wrote down the things we would not be able to do if I was pregnant with an infant at home. Sleep in. Go to a late dinner. Attend an outdoor concert. Carry a light backpack instead of a diaper bag.
That list changed how I thought about waiting. It wasn’t about avoiding discomfort. It was about choosing where to spend our energy. We weren’t postponing a baby. We were rearranging our own priorities so that when a baby did come, we wouldn’t look back at those trips with an “I wish we had gone” energy. That kind of wishing is what makes parents sigh when they talk about pre-kid life.
We also asked each other a harder question: “What are we waiting for, exactly?” For me, the answer was three things: nine hours of uninterrupted sleep, a feeling of being rested enough to actually enjoy pregnancy, and one more trip where I could hike in the morning and lay flat on a chair by the pool all afternoon. My husband’s list was simpler. “I want to be able to take you out to dinner without finding a sitter,” he said. That was honest. We wrote those lists down and put them on the fridge. Not as a countdown, but as a reminder that the waiting had a shape.
The vacations came. We went to Santa Fe and ate green chile at lunch, hiked in the morning, and took long naps in the afternoon. I drank coffee without calculating caffeine limits. We talked about names for a second child and also about whether we could learn to cook fish at home. The second trip was less smooth. His family’s cabin had no air conditioning, and we nearly ran out of patience after two days of rain. We played cards, complained about the humidity, and drove forty minutes for ice cream. It was not magical. But we came home, and somehow the question didn’t feel as heavy. We started trying the next month.
It didn’t work right away. That’s another thing nobody warns you about. The calendar we had made didn’t care about our plans. We waited through a negative test in August, then another one in October. By then, I had stopped thinking about the vacations. I was just tired of waiting for an answer.
In November, I found out I was pregnant. By then, the cabin was a memory, the Santa Fe coffee was a memory, and I was mostly tired in a way that didn’t leave room for checking off a “before baby” list. But I also felt a little steadier. We had taken the vacations. We had been honest about what we wanted. The pregnancy felt like something we had made room for, not something that had interrupted our plans.
If you’re trying to decide whether to wait until after a couple of vacations, I’d suggest doing what we did. Write down what the vacations are actually for. Ask your partner what they’re hoping to use that time for. Be specific. “Rest” means something different from “see a concert” or “visit my brother.” Then make a list of what would be hardest to do while pregnant or with an infant. Use that as your guide. Not as a rule, but as a way to see if you’re waiting for something that would still matter once the baby arrives.
Now, with my daughter close to turning three and a baby due in spring, I think back to that kitchen table conversation. I still don’t have a clean answer to “should you wait?” The truth is, there’s no guarantee that waiting will make pregnancy easier, or that a vacation will make you feel better. Some people get pregnant after years of waiting, and some have a baby before they’ve had a single night away. The reason waiting helped us wasn’t the timing. It was the conversations we had while we were waiting. We learned to say what we actually needed instead of just saying yes to the calendar. I don’t know if that made the pregnancy easier. But I think it made the marriage a little stronger.
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