Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? What I Learned After We Stopped Waiting
The ferry was bobbing somewhere between the Greek islands, and my husband was looking at a map on his phone. We’d already been traveling for two weeks, and it was the kind of trip we’d been talking about for years—slow mornings, late lunches, swimming in water that looked like a postcard. And now he was doing the thing he always did. “There’s one more island,” he said. “I know we’re tired, but what if we just took a few extra days?”
I knew what he was really asking. We had a plan. We had a timeline. But every time we got close to the timeline, we found another reason to nudge it forward. One more vacation. Then another. Then a couple of vacations.
So when he said, “What if we just do one more trip after this?” I didn’t answer right away. Because I wanted to say yes. I wanted to believe that if we just had a little more time, we’d feel ready. But we’d already been saying that for three years.
We weren’t the first people to use travel as a way to postpone a decision. We knew that. But sitting on that ferry, it felt like a real question: If we had a baby, we’d lose something. And we didn’t want to give it up yet.
Here’s what I kept coming back to: We weren’t really talking about vacations. We were talking about the last moments of a life we understood. The problem is that you can’t know when the last moments are. You just discover them in the rearview mirror.
A few weeks after we got home, we still hadn’t made a decision. We went to a dinner party at our friends’ house. They had a four-month-old and a toddler, and while the toddler knocked over a sippy cup, the baby slept in a carrier. I asked the mom how she was doing. She said, “Fine, but we just had our first date night in four months. We went to a grocery store without the kids.”
I laughed. Then she told me they’d taken the baby on a weekend trip when he was six weeks old. “Everyone told us not to,” she said. “But we booked a cabin an hour away, we told ourselves we could leave anytime, and we did. It was mostly terrible. We watched a movie while he slept, and then we drove home. It was still worth it.”
That stuck with me. Because it wasn’t the kind of vacation we were mourning. It wasn’t a ferry in Greece. But she wasn’t waiting for the perfect time. She was just doing things in a smaller, slower version.
We started talking about what we actually wanted from those vacations. Not the abstract idea of “travel.” The specific things: waking up without an alarm, hiking for hours, eating dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t have a kids’ menu, getting on a plane and not thinking about nap schedules. And then we asked the real question: Which of these are truly impossible with a baby?
As it turns out, fewer than we thought. You can still wake up without an alarm—a baby might wake you up, but not because you have an itinerary. You can still travel. You just have to plan around sleep. You can even hike with a baby strapped to your chest; I know parents who did it. The only thing we genuinely couldn’t do was the kind of long, unplanned, backpack-into-the-wilderness trip we used to love. But we hadn’t done one of those in five years anyway.
So we decided not to wait. And then we did something that felt both reckless and sensible: We booked a trip for the second trimester. A babymoon, people call it. The first trimester had been exhaustion and nausea, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to go somewhere that required a plane. We went to a small town in France. I slept a lot. We ate pastries. We walked slowly. It wasn’t the same as that Greek ferry, but it was its own version.
And after the baby came, we took a trip when he was five months old. We flew to see my sister across the country. We packed a pack-and-play, a white-noise machine, and a bag of pacifiers that I dropped under our seat. The flight was okay. The first night was tough. But he fell asleep in a little rental crib, and we sat in the kitchen drinking coffee while he slept. In the morning, he rolled over and smiled, and I realized that a vacation with a baby is not less of a vacation. It’s just a different kind of doing things.
If you’re standing where we were, trying to decide whether to wait until after a couple more trips before you get pregnant, I’d say this: Look at the trips you have in mind and ask yourself what’s actually in them. If the answer is “the ease of spontaneity,” you might be waiting a long time. Ease doesn’t come back for a few years, and sometimes not even then. If the answer is “just the two of us,” you can still have that—you just have to delegate the baby to a grandparent for a weekend, or plan a short trip where you trade off turns. It’s not the same, but nothing stays the same.
The thing that finally helped us wasn’t a pros-and-cons list. It was making two columns: Things that actually need to happen before a baby, and things that can be adapted. The first column had almost nothing in it. A backpacking trek was already out because of a knee injury. A long-distance cycling trip was out because neither of us was fit. The only real item was “sleep in a tent somewhere quiet,” and we’d done that plenty.
The second column had everything else. Travel, adventure, long slow mornings—all doable, just with more baggage and early nights.
So we stopped waiting. Not because we felt ready. We didn’t. We just understood that readiness was never going to arrive. It wasn’t about the vacations. It was about feeling like we weren’t giving up the future, even though we were changing it.
Now, with a toddler and a second baby on the way, we’ve taken trips that look nothing like we imagined. There has been a Disney World–adjacent hotel with a splash pad. There was a road trip that involved stopping at a Target to buy a replacement car seat strap. There was a beach week where nap time was non-negotiable and sunsets happened at 6:30 p.m. because that’s when bed time was.
And yet, I don’t feel like we lost anything. We still look at the map on our phones and imagine places. We still talk about trips we want to take—just smaller ones, or ones we’ll do when the kids are older. But we don’t use them as a reason to delay anymore. Because if we had waited for those couple of vacations we kept promising ourselves, we might have waited until it was too late. Not too late biologically, but too late in the sense that we would have built our whole life around a version of the future that never actually existed.
We did eventually go to Greece again, last year. We took the kids. It was not the same. We ate dinner early, we went back to the hotel by nine, and we spent a lot of time chasing a bucket near the water. But at one point, our toddler fell asleep on my husband’s shoulder while the ferry crossed the Aegean, and I got to watch the sun go down and the island get closer. I couldn’t have planned that moment. It just happened.
I’m still not sure we made the right call about the timing. I’m not sure anyone can know that. But I can tell you this: the vacations we were so worried about losing would have turned into memories we were saving for a life that hadn’t started yet. Instead, we started living that life. And the trips we took later became part of it. That’s not a perfectly clear ending. It’s just what happened.
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