Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? What a Parenting Coach Thinks
My sister-in-law called me last week, not long after she and her husband had gotten back from a long weekend in Mexico. They’d booked the trip months ago, spent four days lying on a beach in Puerto Vallarta, and come home with that loose, relaxed energy you only get after a solid stretch of doing absolutely nothing. They were sitting in the airport terminal, waiting for their connecting flight, when he looked at her and said, “So, should we just start trying now, or do we wait until after the Europe trip?”
She laughed at the time. But by the time she called me, the question was sitting on her chest like a cat. They had one more big vacation planned—a two-week trip to Portugal in early September with another couple. She was turning 34 in October. Her husband had just gotten a big promotion that meant less travel for him. Everything on paper said: go. But she kept coming back to that vacation. “I don’t want to be tired for Portugal,” she told me. “I don’t want to be nauseous on a walking tour. And I definitely don’t want to spend my last major childless trip sitting in a hotel room with a pregnancy pillow.”
It sounded reasonable. It also sounded like a trap.
I told her a story about my own pre-pregnancy timeline, which involved a very specific, very stupid spreadsheet. I had a work trip to Japan on the calendar—a bucket-list thing. My husband and I had been trying for a few months. When we first started, I organized my cycles in a color-coded app, but not for fertility. I was color-coding trips. Yellow meant “safe to travel.” Red meant “maybe pregnant and don’t want to be.”
We ended up delaying for about three months because of Japan. Then a wedding in Napa. Then a cabin weekend in October with friends who had just had their first kid and promised a “lazy, boozy, no-kids weekend” that would now never happen.
Eventually, I had a conversation with my midwife, Anna, who looked at my carefully planned calendar and said something that broke the spell: “So you’re waiting to start a family so you can have one more good time. What happens if the good time doesn’t happen? What happens if you wait until after Portugal, and then you get pregnant, and the pregnancy is rough, and you feel like you wasted that time anyway?”
It wasn’t a guilt trip. Anna wasn’t saying I shouldn’t have fun. She was pointing out that I had made the vacation into a talisman. The vacation had become this stand-in for all the freedom I was scared of losing. I wasn’t actually protecting my experience. I was protecting a version of my life that was already over.
The real issue was not the timing of conception. The real issue was the fiction that there would ever be a “perfect” nine months to carry a child.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then, both from my own experience and from watching friends navigate the same question:
Pressure is the enemy of enjoyment. If you’re on a two-week trip to Portugal and you’re secretly aware that this is your “last hurrah,” you’re not actually fully in Portugal. You’re in a museum, thinking, “Next year, I might be here with a diaper bag.” You’re on a boat tour, calculating whether the motion would make you seasick while pregnant. You’re not relaxing. You’re performing a farewell ritual. And there’s a very real chance you’ll look back on that trip with a weird sense of resentment, because it didn’t deliver the freedom you were trying to bank.
The body doesn’t read your itinerary. I have a friend who got pregnant the month before a planned safari in Kenya. She spent most of the trip in the car—not because of morning sickness, but because she hadn’t expected to feel so tired in the first trimester. She didn’t regret it. She says the weird part was that she remembered the trip through a filter of “I was pregnant.” It changed the texture of the memory, but not the quality. She still saw elephants. She still ate amazing food. She was just more tired. And she says she’s glad that trip exists in her life as “the time I was pregnant in Kenya,” rather than as “the trip I canceled my plans for.”
The “energy budget” argument is real, but it’s not about the vacation. The actual issue with pregnancy is not the trip you take while pregnant. It’s the trip you can’t take after. The logistics of a newborn are brutal. But that’s not a reason to delay conception until you’ve had your fill of travel. That’s a reason to recalibrate what travel looks like. The idea that you need to “get it all in” before kids is a fantasy. There will be trips after kids—they’re just different. You’ll go to Disney World when you swore you never would. You’ll carry a diaper bag through an airport and feel like a pack mule. You’ll discover that a beach vacation with a three-year-old is less “beach” and more “sand management.” But you’ll also see the world through their eyes, which is a completely different kind of travel.
So what did I tell my sister-in-law? I told her to ask herself a different question. Not “Should I wait?” but “What am I actually waiting for?”
If she’s waiting because she genuinely wants to be present for a specific physical activity—like diving the Azores or hiking the Douro Valley—that’s a real consideration. For some people, a physically demanding trip matters. If she’s waiting because she doesn’t want to feel sick on a plane, that’s different—because morning sickness peaks in the first trimester, but it rarely lasts the whole pregnancy. If she’s waiting because she wants one more trip where she gets to be blissfully irresponsible, that’s not a medical decision. That’s a grieving decision. She’s grieving the version of herself that just packs a carry-on and leaves.
But here’s the thing I emphasize to every couple I talk to about this. The vacation is not the enemy. The enemy is the infinite deferral. There will always be another trip. Another wedding. Another work project. Another reason why “not yet” feels safer. If you wait for the calendar to clear, you will wait forever.
The practical advice I gave her was simple. Go to Portugal. Enjoy the food. Drink the wine if you’re not pregnant yet. But don’t frame it as the last free thing you’ll ever do. Frame it as a warm-up. A dress rehearsal. A vacation you’re taking where the itinerary is just for you—but you stay flexible. And when you get back, if you’re ready, you’re ready. Don’t rebook the timeline. Just let the next phase start.
She texted me later that night. She said they’d decided to keep trying when they got home, before Portugal. “I’ll be eight weeks pregnant on the walking tour,” she wrote. “But you know what? I’ll be on a walking tour. In Portugal. That’s still pretty good.”
I haven’t heard how the trip went yet. She’s due in April. Knowing her, she probably packed a pregnancy pillow and used it on the plane. That’s the thing about going with it instead of waiting for the perfect moment—you learn to adapt. And that skill, more than any perfectly timed vacation, is what actually prepares you for having a kid.
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