Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Couple of Vacations? What I’d Say Now
I was three days into our big anniversary trip when I caught myself calculating how many more sunrises we had left. We were in a small town on the coast of Costa Rica, the kind of place where you can hear the waves from bed, and everything had been wonderful. That was the problem. We’d spent a year saying, “Let’s do these two last trips first, and then we’ll try.” This was trip number one. Trip number two was already booked for October with another couple.
Instead of feeling free, I felt like I was grading the vacation. Was it romantic enough? Was it restful enough? Did we get enough good pictures? Because once we started trying, we’d probably have to say goodbye to this version of us — the version that could just pick up and fly somewhere without a diaper bag.
At dinner that night, we met another couple from the lodge. They had a two-year-old. At one point, the toddler threw his entire bowl of rice onto the floor. His mom didn’t even flinch. She just wiped it up with a napkin and said, “We took a lot of trips before him. I’m glad we did. But honestly, I miss the airport.”
We all laughed. But afterward, my husband said, “What if we don’t wait? What if we just stop waiting?” We’d been planning around these two trips for months, and his question felt like suddenly putting down a heavy bag. But it also scared me. I liked having a plan. Waiting until after the vacations felt responsible. It felt like we were protecting something — our sleep, our spontaneity, our marriage.
I told him I needed to think. So the next morning, while he was still in bed, I sat with a notebook and wrote down the actual reasons we were waiting. It wasn’t just the trips. I wanted one more summer without worrying about nausea. I wanted to be able to have a glass of wine at a wedding in June. I wanted to be the kind of person who got pregnant on purpose and not just because we forgot to say no. That made sense. But then I wrote down the other side: what we were giving up by waiting.
This is the part I don’t see talked about much. Everyone says “take the trip, sleep in, enjoy being two.” But nobody mentions that waiting can become a habit. Every month you don’t get pregnant, you find another reason to wait — a project at work, a bathroom renovation, the possibility of a new car. The vacations were the excuse we were using, but they weren’t the real reason. The real reason was that trying to get pregnant is scary. You’re trying to welcome somebody you don’t know yet, and there are no refunds for any of it.
We decided to do something practical. We sat down with a calendar and made a list of the two trips. For each one, we asked: if I’m already pregnant during this trip, will I still be glad we went? For Costa Rica, the answer was yes. Even if I felt tired, the trip was mostly lying in hammocks and eating fruit. The hike we’d planned could become a short walk. The zip-lining could become watching other people zip-line from the beach. That was fine.
For the October trip, the answer was different. It was a long weekend with friends to see the fall leaves in New Hampshire. We’d booked a tiny cabin with a shared bathroom and a steep set of stairs. The plan was to hike every day and stay up late playing board games. That trip felt much harder to imagine doing while pregnant. We didn’t want to spend four days pretending to be fine in a cabin with no hot water.
So we made a call: we’d go to Costa Rica and then stop waiting. If I got pregnant right away, we’d cancel the October trip and lose the deposit. If I didn’t, we’d still go, and we’d treat it as our own private babymoon. That sounds neat now, but it wasn’t at the time. It felt like a compromise between my husband’s eagerness and my need for a plan.
As it turned out, I didn’t get pregnant during that first cycle after Costa Rica. I remember standing in our bathroom holding a negative test and feeling a strange mix of sadness and relief. Sadness because we’d started. Relief because I didn’t have to cancel the cabin trip yet. That’s a feeling nobody warns you about: wanting something and also being glad it didn’t happen yet. It doesn’t mean you’re ambivalent. It just means you’re human.
We did go to New Hampshire in October. I wasn’t pregnant. We drank apple cider and hiked with our friends and didn’t talk about babies even once. It was a great trip. And then, the following Tuesday, I missed my period. Two weeks later, we were standing in our kitchen, holding a positive test and looking at a stack of travel brochures we’d grabbed on the way home from the airport.
What I’ve come to believe since then is that the “wait for the vacation” question isn’t really about the vacation. It’s about feeling ready to let go of a version of your life that you actually like. And the truth is, no trip is ever going to make you feel fully ready. We went on both of those trips and got pregnant right after the second one. If I had waited until after a third and a fourth, I’d probably have written the same sentence with a different number.
There’s also a practical side I wish someone had walked me through. A lot of prenatal appointments happen between weeks 8 and 12. If you’re planning a trip, especially a plane trip, you need to think about that schedule. I had a friend who planned a babymoon in the second trimester and had to move it because her due-date ultrasound pushed everything later. Another friend waited to try until after a cruise, only to have extreme morning sickness in the first trimester anyway. You can’t outsmart biology by waiting. You can only make peace with the uncertainty.
If I could go back and give the version of me on that beach in Costa Rica some practical advice, I’d say: make two lists. One list is the trips you want to take before a baby arrives — but rank them by how physically demanding they’d be if you’re pregnant. The other list is the things you’re afraid to lose about your current life. That second list is the one that matters. You can fit a lot into the first trimester if you adjust expectations. But you can’t easily fit in being the same person you were before after a baby arrives.
In the end, we didn’t wait for a third or fourth vacation. We took the two we’d planned, and we’re glad we did. But the biggest surprise was that the second trip meant more than the first. It was the one we almost canceled. It was the one we took when we knew we’d already started trying, and it still turned out to be lovely. We didn’t need it as a last hurrah. We needed it as proof that we could still make plans and have fun even when the future felt uncertain — which is pretty much exactly the skill you need once you have kids.
I don’t know if we made the right call for everyone. There are couples who wait for good reasons: financial savings, health issues, a house that needs repairs. Those reasons are real. But if it’s just because you love traveling and you’re afraid of morning sickness? I’d say go ahead and book the trip. Then go home and try. The trip won’t be ruined if you’re pregnant. It’ll just become a different trip. And that’s okay.
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