Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Teacher’s Take on Timing and Transitions
The question came up while I was scraping sand off a plastic shovel with my thumb, somewhere in the driveway after a five-hour ride home from the beach. My husband had just pulled the last suitcase out of the trunk. “So,” he said, “do we wait? Until after a couple more trips, I mean. Before we try for another one.”
I remember thinking that the question should have felt bigger, more loaded. But it came out the way people ask about picking a weekend to repaint the hallway. We had spent nine days in a rental house with my sister’s family. Our son, three at the time, had eaten more Goldfish crackers than actual food and slept like a starfish between us every night. It was exhausting and lovely, and somehow I was already mourning it.
I didn’t answer him right away. I said something vague, like “Let me think about it.” But the truth is, I’d been thinking about it for weeks. Should we wait to try to have a second baby until we’d taken a few more vacations? Was it wise to give ourselves that time to be a family of three, to fill up on salt air and late mornings and nobody throwing up in a rental-car parking lot? Wouldn’t that make the transition easier for our son?
I teach preschool. I’ve spent years watching children move through changes, and I’ve learned one thing: children don’t keep score the way adults do. Adults make mental ledgers. We say, “We took two beautiful trips and stored up enough calm to last us through a difficult year.” Children don’t have that accounting system. They live in the present tense. A week after vacation, they’re not thinking about the way the ocean looked at sunset. They’re thinking about the fact that you put the cheese sandwich on a blue plate instead of a green one.
When I’m with families, especially after school breaks, I see it over and over. Parents will come in and say, “We had a wonderful time at Disney World, but since we got back, he’s been hitting his little brother.” They expect vacation to be a reset button. Usually it’s the opposite. Vacations are full of excitement, sugar, unpredictability, and parents who are suddenly available. For a small child, that’s a lot. The return to normal life is a letdown, and behavior often falls apart. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take vacations. It just means you shouldn’t expect them to be a deposit in some imaginary emotional bank account.
Standing in the driveway, I almost said all of that to my husband. But then our son started screaming because he wanted to carry the beach umbrella inside, and he wasn’t strong enough, and for some reason, this was the tragedy of the century. We abandoned the conversation.
The next week, things settled down. Our son went back to school. I went back to the classroom. But the question stayed with me. I started noticing how ordinary, unglamorous days actually worked in our house. The mornings when no one cried over breakfast. The afternoons when we went to the library and forgot one of our library books and had to go back. The way our son learned to pour his own orange juice and spilled half of it on the floor, and the way we wiped it up without talking about how he was “almost ready” to be independent.
I began to realize that the thing I wanted to protect was not vacations. It was the feeling of being able to decide things for ourselves. To pack a bag and go, yes, but also to say “not this month” without inventing a reason. A baby changes that. I knew it would. But I also knew that waiting for two more vacations wouldn’t protect it either. The only way to adapt to a new life is to actually be in the new life.
So we didn’t wait. We didn’t plan a big “last trip as a family of three.” We didn’t make a special video of our son talking about becoming a big brother. We just got pregnant, and then, a few months later, I spent a Saturday afternoon throwing up into a paper bag outside the natural history museum while our son asked ten times in a row whether the dinosaurs were real. The dinosaurs were real, and so was the nausea. And somehow, we handled it. We kept the Sunday pancake breakfast we’d been having for years. We read the same three books before bed every night, even when I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. We talked to our son in plain, specific language.
“The baby is going to cry a lot,” I told him one night before his sister was born. “And we are still going to be able to figure out what she needs. It’s okay if you feel tired or annoyed. It’s okay if you feel happy and sad in the same minute.”
That last part came from my work, too. Over the years, I’ve seen siblings arrive in my classroom, and the children who do best are rarely the ones whose parents did a perfect summer of big trips before the new baby. They’re the ones whose parents kept the small things small. They kept the same bedtime, the same “one more story” negotiation, the same Sunday morning walk. They named feelings without trying to fix them. They said things like, “You can be mad at the baby and still love her. That doesn’t make you mean.” They didn’t try to make up for loss by adding more experiences. They just made room for the loss to exist.
We brought our daughter home in February. Our son looked at her, poked her cheek, and asked if she could have some of his toast. He was not transformed into a doting big brother overnight. He was three. He was ordinary. He was a child who suddenly had to wait more, which is hard for any child at any age. There were days when I wondered if we should have waited after all. If we had taken those two vacations, maybe we would have felt more ready. Maybe the transition would have been smoother.
But then I remembered what I tell parents when they ask me how their child will adjust to a new classroom or a new baby or a new house. I tell them: the adjustment is not something you can get ready for. It’s something you live through. You don’t do it at the perfect time. You do it together, badly, in real time, with some spilled orange juice and a few meltdowns and many moments of genuinely not knowing what you’re doing.
A couple of months after our daughter was born, my husband found a list I’d made in the Notes app on my phone. It said: “Things we did before we got pregnant that I’m glad we did.” Under it, I had written, “Got a library card. Learned to make a decent pie crust. Saw a heron at the reservoir.” I had not written “took more vacations.” I don’t remember making the list. I don’t know if it meant anything. But it made me realize that I hadn’t actually wanted to wait for more trips. I had wanted to keep the part of me that could still be surprised by a heron. And having a baby didn’t take that away. It just meant I now had to notice it while also wiping someone’s nose.
Should you wait until after a couple of vacations before getting pregnant? I honestly don’t know. It depends on rest, money, health, energy, how your body handles pregnancy, what your partner does, what your current child does at three in the morning. There are a million reasons to wait, and some of them are very real. I can only say this: a vacation will not act as armor. Neither will two. Love, attention, and patience don’t work on a rewards system. They work when you’re tired and cranky and the toast is burned.
The morning after we brought our daughter home, I looked at my son and noticed that his ankles didn’t fit into his boots anymore. He had grown a quarter of an inch while we were in the hospital, or maybe I just hadn’t looked closely enough. He was already a different person. That would have been true whether we waited or not. That might be the only certain thing.
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