Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Couple of Vacations? A Teacher and Parent’s Perspective
The map was spread over the kitchen table, and my husband was tapping a finger on a circled stretch of coast. “If we book this cottage for May,” he said, “and you get pregnant in June, that’s fine, right?” He paused. “Or should we wait until after both trips?”
We had two trips planned that year. One was a long weekend at that cottage. The other was a week with my sister and her family in Portland. We had been saying “let’s try after the school year” for a while, and now the school year was ending. But the trips were sitting between us and the decision. For weeks, I had gone back and forth. I wanted another child. I also wanted to sleep past six, to sit on a beach without worrying about anything, to be just the three of us for a little longer.
Before I had my own daughter, I taught kindergarten. I spent years watching children become big brothers and sisters. Every year, at least one child would start the fall fine and then, after a baby arrived in November or March, start wetting their pants at school or biting their best friend. The parents would be confused. We’d talk through it. Usually, it wasn’t about the baby at all. It was about the child feeling the parent’s stress, the changed voices, the hurried mornings. Children process transition through behavior, not through language.
That teacher habit followed me into my own family planning. I knew that adding a sibling is a major developmental event for a child and for the adults in the house. I also knew that parents often underestimate how tired they already are before the baby even arrives. So when my husband asked about the trips, I didn’t say “let’s just try and see.” I said, “Let’s think about what we need before we’re pregnant.”
We made a list. Not the usual pros and cons. We wrote down the things that would need to be true for us: a month of regular sleep, a date night that didn’t involve tucking our toddler in early, a bathroom floor that was actually finished. It turned out the vacations could give us some of that, but not all of it. The cottage had one bathroom and no washing machine. The trip to Portland would be fun, but it would also be busy. We needed to be honest that a vacation is not the same as rest.
A friend of mine, a mother of two, told me something that helped. “You’ll always be tired,” she said. “But the tired is different. With your first, you don’t know what’s coming. With your second, you know you’ll survive, which is somehow worse.” She wasn’t trying to scare me. She was just saying that waiting for the “right time” was a trap. The right time, in her experience, was when you’d stopped asking the question. For her, that happened right after a family trip to the lake. She said the trip didn’t change anything, but it gave her a clean line: she could close one season and start another.
I started to think about my own classroom children again. The ones who handled a new sibling best were not necessarily the ones with the biggest age gap. They were the ones whose parents had made the transition visible. The parents would say things like, “The baby is coming after the summer, and here is your new room.” They didn’t hide it. They also didn’t pretend everything would be perfect. They named what would be hard: “I won’t be able to pick you up as much.” That honesty felt like something we could borrow.
So we decided to take the trips first. We made it concrete. We put the date on the calendar: no pregnancy attempts until after the Portland trip, after we’d been home for a week, after we’d both had one full night of sleep in our own bed. It wasn’t a medical rule. It was a boundary. It gave us permission to stop thinking about conception during breakfast, during coffee, during the long drive to the coast.
On the first trip, we didn’t do anything special. We walked on the shore, ate sandwiches, and watched our daughter chase seagulls. The bathroom floor still wasn’t finished. But I remember sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee while my husband and daughter napped. It was one of those ordinary moments that you later recognize as a door. I thought, “If I’m pregnant next month, I’ll remember this.” And that was enough.
The second trip was louder. My sister’s kids argued over toys, and my daughter caught a cold. There was no quiet porch moment. But there was a moment in the kitchen, after the kids were asleep, when the four of us drank wine and talked about what it was like to be parents. My sister said she had always regretted rushing into her second pregnancy because she was worried about the age gap. She had missed the last quiet summer with her first. She didn’t say I should wait. She just said that if I had any doubt, doubt was worth listening to.
I called my doctor’s office before the trips, mostly to ask about Zika and mosquito repellent. They told me the travel itself wasn’t a problem, as long as I was careful in certain areas. We were going to Maine and Oregon, so that wasn’t an issue. But the call made me realize something: the question was not medical. It was not even educational. It was about whether I could be fully present for a pregnancy, and a child, without feeling like I had missed something first.
In the end, we took the trips. We came home. We fixed the bathroom floor, partly because my husband felt like he had to prove he hadn’t been slacking. And then we started trying. It took longer than we expected, which is its own kind of lesson. I spent months wondering if we should have started earlier. But when our second daughter finally arrived, I didn’t think about the timing. I thought about the trips, especially the quiet morning on the porch. That memory didn’t make the newborn nights easier. It just gave me something calm to hold onto.
So if you’re asking whether to wait until after a couple of vacations, I wouldn’t overthink the vacations themselves. I’d ask what the vacations represent. If they represent a chance to feel settled, rested, and connected, that’s a good reason to wait. If they represent a delay because deep down you’re not sure you want another child, that’s worth exploring long before you worry about the travel calendar. No one can give you the perfect answer. But if the question is sitting in your head, it’s already telling you something. Listen to it, and then take the coffee out to the porch while you can.
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