Should We Wait to Get Pregnant After a Few More Vacations? What Really Changes When You Add a Child
The baggage carousel at the airport had just spit out our bags for the third time that summer. I was digging a half-melted granola bar out of the side pocket of my backpack when my friend Sarah asked it. Not directly, at first. She was watching my four-year-old spin in circles near the luggage belt, and then she said, “You know, we’ve been holding off on booking anything until after… well, until we decide. He wants to go to Greece in the spring, and I want to see if I’m ready.”
She didn’t need to finish. I knew what “decide” meant: whether to start trying for a second child. And “ready” meant her body, her marriage, her job, but also the fact that they’d just had two beautiful, uncomplicated vacations with nothing but their backpacks and each other. A few days before, she’d posted a photo of the two of them eating gelato on a stone street, and the caption just said “this life.” I remember that feeling.
I remember being in that exact spot. We’d gotten married, taken a big trip to Portugal, come home, and within a month we were pregnant with our son. Then, when he was about two, we had a stretch of golden weekends. No bottles, no baby monitor, just a kid who could walk and a car that could go anywhere. We thought about trying again. Then we took one more trip to a cabin by a lake. I sat on the dock and thought, this is so good. Why would anyone complicate this? We waited another eight months, and then our daughter arrived.
The funny thing is, the conversation Sarah and I had at the airport didn’t end with an answer. It ended with me telling her that the question she was really asking wasn’t about Greece or about spring. It was about whether she could let go of the version of her life that was working so well.
What I’ve come to understand since is that vacations have a very specific way of making us believe our baseline is calmer than it actually is. When you’re away, you’re not doing laundry at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. You’re not answering work emails in the crevice between soccer practice and dinner. You’re not having the same recurring argument about whose turn it is to clean the bathroom. You’re sleeping later, eating at normal times, and walking by the ocean. So when you say, “We should wait to get pregnant so we can have more vacations,” you’re really saying, “I want to hold onto this ease for a little longer.” And that is completely reasonable. But the ease isn’t the trip. The ease is the absence of daily responsibility.
So what should Sarah actually think about? Not “will we ever travel again,” because you really, trivially will, although it looks different. The more useful questions are about how she and her husband handle disruption. A baby is a disruption without a scheduled return flight.
One concrete thing I’ve found: watch how you and your partner are on the second day of a vacation when something changes. If one of you gets sick, or it rains hard for six hours, what happens? Do you get irritable and start keeping score, or do you adjust? That’s a pretty good preview of the newborn weeks. It’s not the same, obviously. But it tells you something about your shared capacity for improvisation.
Another thing: the age gap question. If Sarah waits until after another vacation, she might be waiting another year, maybe more. Her son would be older, more verbal, more independent. That’s genuinely useful. A three-year-old can tell you he’s hungry or needs the potty. An eighteen-month-old rarely can. On the other hand, a wider gap means the older child has had years of being an only child. When the baby comes, you’re not just adding a sibling. You’re asking a person who has experienced being the center of the universe to suddenly share the room. That transition has its own challenges. It’s not that one gap is better; it’s that each gap changes the texture of family life in ways you can’t fully predict from the outside.
I did tell Sarah about what I call the test trip. Before we committed to trying for our second, we took our two-year-old on a four-day road trip involving a wedding, a long drive, and a rental cabin with no dishwasher. It was not relaxing. He got a fever. We fought about the GPS. At least twice we sat in silence eating gas-station sandwiches. But something shifted. We survived it together. We got through the hard parts without blaming each other, and honestly, that gave me more confidence about expanding our family than any beach vacation ever did. If you’re trying to decide whether to wait, I think that’s a more useful exercise than another ideal getaway. Plan a weekend or even a single long overnight where you intentionally make it a little harder. A place with no blackout curtains. A drive that’s two hours longer than the toddler’s patience. No dishwasher, no extra guest room, no chance to tag out. Just the two of you and whatever comes up. Notice who reaches for the sunscreen and who reaches for the wine. Notice what you say to each other when the schedule falls apart. That tells you something real.
If she doesn’t want to wait, there’s no rule that says she has to give up travel either. Last winter I met a mother who flew to Costa Rica with a three-month-old. She said it was completely different. The baby didn’t sleep on the plane. She pumped in an airport bathroom. They spent most of the trip in the hotel room. But she didn’t regret it. She had a picture of herself holding the baby in the rainforest, and that was enough for her. The point isn’t that you should do that. The point is that “travel” and “being pregnant” or “having a baby” aren’t opposites. They’re just combinations that require different amounts of planning and lowered expectations.
At the same time, I understand the wanting to wait. For a lot of parents, especially mothers, the first pregnancy can feel like the end of something. You don’t know how long it’ll be before you again pack a bag with only your own stuff in it, and the honest answer is: maybe years. That’s a real loss, and it’s worth feeling it before you choose it. The parenting blogs don’t always say that. They talk about the joy of holding your newborn and how your heart expands. But the loss is real too, and it’s okay to want one more season of how it is now.
What I wish someone had told me is this: if you want to wait, wait because you genuinely feel not ready, not because you think a perfect final trip will complete some chapter. There will always be another trip, or there won’t, and neither means you’ve failed. The bigger thing is getting to know how you and your partner function when things are messy. Because that’s what the next ten years are going to involve, with or without vacations.
Sarah texted me last week. She said they booked a short trip to a coastal town at the end of the month, and they’d decided to stop “being careful” after that. Not waiting for Greece. Not waiting for the perfect spring. Just giving themselves one more long weekend in the sun, then letting the next part happen.
I don’t know if that’s the right call for her. I don’t know if that’s the right call for anyone. I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if we’d taken the lake trip a couple more seasons, let our son get a little older, maybe spaced them further apart. And other days, when I see our two kids wrestling on the living room floor while the coffee goes cold, I’m glad we didn’t wait. The question never really goes away. You just eventually stop asking it, because you’re too busy living around the answer.
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