We Took Two Vacations Before Trying to Get Pregnant — Was It Worth the Wait?
My husband and I were sitting in a tiny café in Porto, sipping espressos after a long afternoon of walking. We had just finished the first of two big vacations we’d planned before starting a family. The idea had been simple: take a few trips we would never be able to take once we had kids, get the wanderlust out of our systems, then come home and start trying. I remember looking at the laminated menu and laughing at how responsible we were being. Like we were pre-paying a debt to our future selves.
We had a whole spreadsheet back then. Not a detailed one, but enough: two trips, twelve months, a savings goal, and a loose timeline for when I’d go off birth control. The second trip was booked for six months later—a quieter beach vacation in Mexico. We called them our “last hurrahs” and our “baby honeymoons,” even though we were already married. Everyone thought it was a sweet plan. I thought so, too.
But sitting in that Portuguese café, the plan felt less like a reward and more like a postponement. I had just turned 34. My doctor had casually mentioned that age was a factor, not to stress me out, but to keep in mind. My husband saw me staring at the tourist map and asked if I was still excited about the trip. I was. I also felt this strange pressure to enjoy myself, as if every meal and every view had to count double because later there might not be any.
We finished the trip. I drank sangria on a hill at sunset, bought a linen shirt I never wore, and took a hundred photos of cobblestone streets. Then we went home, refreshed, and dove into the next six months of ordinary life. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about the second vacation much. Work got busy, a friend had a baby, and suddenly the spreadsheet felt like a countdown.
The second vacation was in Mexico. It rained for three days straight. We sat in the hotel room playing cards and arguing about whether we should order room service or brave the walk to the restaurant. On the last day, the sun finally came out, and we lay by the pool silently, both thinking the same thing. We were about to be parents. Did we feel ready? No. But we had done what we planned. We had the vacations under our belts.
Looking back now, with a toddler who thinks sleep is optional, I can’t say the trips were pointless. They gave us something. But not what we expected.
What they actually gave us was practice at talking about uninterruptible time. On the Portugal trip, we had a long conversation about what we’d do if I got pregnant and my job situation changed. We discussed how we would split parental leave, something we had never discussed before because it felt too future-y. We talked about money, but not in the abstract. We did the math on our savings and decided to book the Mexico trip with credit card points, which freed up cash for baby stuff later.
That kind of conversation doesn’t happen over dinner at home when your phone is buzzing and the laundry needs folding. It happens when you have sixteen hours of nothing but each other, and the only decision is which street to walk down next. We needed that. Not the vacation itself, but the forced slowness that vacations create.
The second trip taught us something less pleasant: we are not as spontaneous as we think. When the rain ruined our plans, we both got grumpy. We had imagined an idyllic goodbye-to-childless-life trip, and instead we were stuck inside with nothing to do. We had to work through being annoyed, remind each other that the rain wasn’t personal, and eventually accept that even the “perfect” trip could go sideways. That has been surprisingly useful with a kid. The ability to say, “This is not what we planned, and that’s okay,” is probably the most transferable skill we brought home from either vacation.
But here’s what the trips didn’t do. They didn’t make us feel like we had gotten travel “out of our system.” If anything, they made us want more travel. Coming home from Porto, I spent a week looking up backpacking routes in South America. That was the opposite of settling down. And sure enough, now we do vacation differently—we visit grandparents, we drive places, we find playgrounds. It’s not the same, but it’s not nothing.
So when a friend recently asked me whether she should wait to get pregnant until after she and her husband take a couple of vacations, I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. I asked her why she wanted to wait. She said, “I want to enjoy our twenties a little longer.” Her husband is 31. I’m not sure that’s about vacations at all.
If the answer is that you want to sleep in, stay out late, or wake up in a city where no one knows your name, then yes, take the trip. Those things are genuinely easier to do before kids. Not impossible after kids, but different. The window of total flexibility closes. If the answer is that you want some final stretch of just-the-two-of-you time, that has more to do with your relationship than with airports. A weekend away, even a long one, can do that.
But if the answer is that you’re waiting because you’re afraid—afraid you won’t have the energy, the money, or the identity you want once you’re a parent—no amount of travel will fix that. The fear lingers. It just learns to live alongside the diapers.
I wish I had asked myself that question back then. I would have realized that I wanted the trips because I thought they would prove we were still young. We weren’t exactly young. We were thirty-somethings with a retirement fund and a good knife set. The vacations were a way to pretend the next chapter wasn’t coming. A nice, sun-drenched way, but a postponement all the same.
We ended up getting pregnant after the second trip, quicker than we expected. I spent a lot of my first trimester remembering the rain in Mexico and the espresso in Portugal. Those trips now feel less like a farewell and more like a foundation. They gave us something we needed: conversational ground, a shared sense of adventure that got rebooted, and permission to be disappointed when things didn’t go perfectly.
If I could do it again, would I take the vacations first? Honestly, yes. I would. But I would take them honestly—not as a last hurrah, but as a test run for the kind of partnership we wanted going forward. And I would let go of the idea that there’s a right amount of freedom to consume before becoming a parent. There isn’t. You just take what you have and build from there.
Now, with a toddler, we talk about the next trip. Not a big one. Maybe three days at the coast. It feels like a luxury and a headache at the same time. That’s probably what being a parent is. You don’t need to wait until you’ve had enough vacations. You just need enough willingness to be interrupted.
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