Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Having a Couple of Vacations? What We Learned When We Decided to Wait
We were sitting at the kitchen table with the calendar spread out between us. My husband had drawn a red circle around the first week of May and written “Beach” inside it. Then he circled September and wrote “Cabin.” Between the two circles was a small question mark.
“If we start trying now,” he said, “you might be pretty nauseous on the first trip. Or tired. And by September, you’d be far enough along that hiking might not be comfortable.”
I looked at the flights I’d already booked, the nonrefundable Airbnb, the list of narrow trails I wanted to walk. I said, “What if we just wait?”
So we did. We waited through spring and through summer. We took both vacations. I walked the trails without worrying about restroom access. I ate deli meat on the beach without a second thought. And each time, I felt a little relief that we weren’t dealing with a pregnancy on top of a trip.
But there was also an odd feeling underneath the relief. We weren’t just waiting for vacation. We were waiting to start something that had already been decided. The baby wasn’t real yet because we’d pushed the test into a later month. The calendar became a way to hold parenthood at arm’s length for a little while longer.
We knew better, or thought we did. A friend of ours had said, “There’s no baby that comes at exactly the right time.” But we nodded and kept planning. We liked having a reason to wait. It felt responsible. We told ourselves we were giving our daughter one more season as an only child, one more set of trips where we could focus completely on her. Still, I remember standing on the beach in May and feeling a strange sense of suspended animation. The trip was great. But it was also, in a quiet way, a waiting room.
Maybe that’s the part nobody mentions when people ask about timing pregnancy around vacations. It’s not just about the travel. It’s about why you want to wait. Sometimes a vacation is a legitimate reason—you have an international flight, you’re in a wedding, you want to enjoy a few more months of sleep. Other times, the vacation is a container for worries you haven’t put into words.
In our case, the wait did give us something. We came back from those trips with more ease, more shared memories, and a little extra cushion in our bank account. When we finally did start trying, I felt more settled. The trips had done their job.
But the real surprise came after the baby was born. Our daughter was four then, and the transition hit her harder than we expected. She was excited about the baby in a distant, cheerful way, but she got clingy around bedtime and started waking at 3 a.m. asking if we could go to the park the next day. It wasn’t jealousy exactly. It was uncertainty. She wasn’t sure what was going to change.
That’s where the vacations came in again, just not the way I’d expected. The trips we’d taken before the pregnancy were already part of our family story. When she felt wobbly, we could point to one of them and say, “Remember when we went to the beach and watched the pelicans? We’ll do that again someday.” Those memories became a bridge before she could articulate what she needed: reassurance that the world she loved still existed.
We also made small, concrete adjustments that helped more than any big talk about “becoming a big sister.” We made a simple photo book together using pictures printed from my phone. We included photos of her as a baby, a few pictures of my growing belly, and some blank pages where she could draw what she thought the baby would look like. We read it before bed, and at first she mostly wanted to talk about herself as a baby, not the new baby. That was fine. It gave her a way to think about the change without being quizzed about her feelings.
We also kept her routine exactly the same for the first few weeks after the baby came. Same oatmeal for breakfast, same playground after lunch, same two stories at night. The baby fit around her schedule rather than the other way around. That sounds obvious, but in the haze of newborn time, it’s easy to let a toddler’s rhythm drift. We wrote her favorite anchors on the fridge: “park,” “pancakes,” “Grandma call at 4.” It sounds too simple, but it worked. She knew that some things weren’t going anywhere.
One phrase helped a lot. Instead of saying “soon you’ll have a baby sister,” we said, “Soon the baby will be here, and we’ll still do the park on Saturdays.” It was a small shift, but it told her that her life wasn’t being replaced. The baby was being added.
We took one short trip when the baby was two months old. It was nowhere near as ambitious as our pre-pregnancy vacations—just a three-hour drive to a lake with my parents. But we planned something special for our daughter on that trip: an hour when just she and I went to the lake dock to throw rocks in the water while dad stayed back with the baby. She talked about that hour for weeks. It didn’t cost much. It just required us to give her a piece of the trip that wasn’t shared.
Now, when people ask me whether they should wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations, I don’t have a clean answer. I can list the practical things: if your trip involves ziplining, off-grid camping, or a week of long-distance hiking, waiting makes sense. If you’re traveling somewhere with limited healthcare or a lot of food safety concerns, waiting might be worth the money. But I also know that a vacation is not a neutral reason to wait. It can be a way to pretend that timing is the issue.
If you do decide to wait, use the waiting time deliberately. Don’t just fill it with packing and reservations. Let the older child see you preparing for the change. Make the photos, draw the pictures, repeat the anchors. Let the vacation be a way to strengthen the family rhythm rather than a last hurrah before everything gets complicated. And when the baby does arrive, remember that the best “trip” might be a small one—a walk to the corner store, a slow hour by the water—that you give to the older child alone. That smallness matters more than any big destination.
Would I do it again? We made the right choice for that season. I’m still not sure I’d say waiting made parenting a second child easier. It made the trips better, and that was real. But the work of making a new family feel safe and familiar didn’t start at the airport and didn’t end when we came home. It started when we stopped waiting and started paying attention to the person who was already here.
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