Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? A Parent and Teacher’s Honest Take
At the gate, a toddler made a run for the windows. His mother caught him by the hood of his jacket and set him down next to a carry-on. The baby in the stroller started to cry. The father knelt, opened a bag of crackers, and for a second everything was quiet. Then the toddler grabbed the crackers and dumped them on the floor. The mother looked at my husband and rolled her eyes. Not desperately. More like, “this is exactly what we expected.”
I felt a little sick. Not because the scene was bad—honestly, the family looked like they were handling it. But because a few weeks earlier, we’d made two big decisions: we booked two vacations, and we decided to stop “not trying” for a second child. The first trip was a long weekend at the coast with friends. The second was a week with my brother-in-law’s family in Colorado. We’d chosen those dates carefully, before I got pregnant. “If it happens quickly,” I said, “the coast trip will land right in the first trimester. I’ll be exhausted.” My husband shrugged. “So maybe we wait until after the trips to try?” And I didn’t know what to say.
I’ve worked in early childhood education for over a decade, so I know a little about how kids handle big changes. A new sibling is one of the biggest. Toddlers might regress in sleep, eating, or potty training. They might go back to baby talk, or start crying at dropoff. What I hadn’t thought about was that a vacation is also a change. For a two-year-old, a new bed isn’t a fun novelty. It’s a confusing thing that happens right before sleep, when their brain is already tired. That trip to the coast wasn’t just a trip. It was a transition, stacked on top of another transition.
But that’s not why I hesitated. I hesitated because I wasn’t ready to give up the idea of a “last normal vacation.” I wanted one more trip where I could nap on the plane, stay up late talking, and order coffee without counting the caffeine. My husband, ever practical, said, “You can still do all those things. Just not the coffee part.” I know he meant well. But the baby sleep thing, the toddler with the crackers, the sheer logistics of traveling with a small child—I wasn’t sure I could handle all that while pregnant.
So we didn’t decide. We just let it happen. And then it happened.
By the time we got on the plane for the coast, I was nine weeks pregnant and nauseated whenever the lady next to us ate her egg sandwich. Our daughter, who was two, spent the flight alternating between looking out the window and trying to climb over the tray table. We had packed snacks, a new small toy, and about four books. It was not relaxing. But it wasn’t terrible either. I slept badly in the rental house, but so did everyone. The second trip, at twenty-two weeks, was easier. I could keep up with our daughter again, mostly, as long as I had a rest in the afternoon.
Would it have been better to wait? I think about this a lot. If we’d waited, we would have had those vacations as pure, non-pregnant experiences. We could have slept in, gone on longer hikes, stayed up late. But we also might have spent the whole time thinking about babies. Maybe we’d have been at the coast, looking at the waves, and I’d have been quietly counting days in my head, waiting for a negative or positive test. There’s no version where the vacation is totally carefree once you’ve started trying. The trying changes it too.
If you’re asking yourself whether to wait until after a couple of trips to get pregnant, I’d say this: the trips aren’t really the question. The question is what you need right now.
Are you burned out? Are you the one who always packs the bags, plans the meals, and knows where the pacifier is? Then taking a trip without a pregnancy—or without a baby—might genuinely refill you. That’s not selfish. That’s real. If you show up to a vacation already empty, you won’t enjoy it, pregnant or not. You’ll just be tired somewhere nicer.
But if the reason is more about the perfect timeline—the ideal age gap, the summer before kindergarten, the house project you want to finish—then waiting might not help. There will always be another project. And your current child is not going to stay the same age. Six months can change a toddler a lot. A two-and-a-half-year-old might sleep better on vacation than a two-year-old does. Or not. There’s no way to know.
What I can tell you, from the classroom and from my own messy family trips, is that young children handle change better when the adults around them aren’t holding onto a fantasy. If you go into a vacation expecting it to be easy, you’ll be angry. If you go in expecting some hard moments, you can plan around them. That works whether you’re pregnant, waiting, or already have three kids.
A few things actually helped us. We rented a place with a separate bedroom, so after our daughter fell asleep we could sit in the living room without whispering. We brought her pillowcase and her stuffed fox and set up her bed before she saw the room. We didn’t plan more than one outing per day. When she melted down, I tried to say, “You’re tired. This is a lot of new stuff. Let’s find your fox,” instead of trying to reason with her. It didn’t always work. But it was better than the alternative—which was me telling her to calm down and then feeling terrible.
I also learned that a pregnant parent traveling with a toddler needs more grace, not more itinerary. On the coast trip, I napped on the couch while my daughter played with grandma. I felt guilty, but nobody actually cared. The vacation wasn’t ruined. It just looked different than it would have before.
So, should you wait? I can’t answer that for you. I can tell you that we didn’t, and I’m still not sure whether that was the right call. Some days I think we should have taken those trips alone, just the two of us, and started trying after. Other days I look at our daughter and the baby now, and I think the timing was exactly what it was. The trips were good. The pregnancy was hard. The baby is here, and the older one still runs around airport gates and dumps crackers on the floor. Life doesn’t wait for the perfect window. It just keeps moving, and you decide, trip by trip, how much you’re willing to carry.
That’s okay. We’re still figuring it out. And if you’re in the same place, figuring it out is allowed too.
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