Should You Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? An Honest Parent’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I sat across from my 31-year-old cousin Mia at a food truck park, cheese curds congealing in our paper basket, while she pulled up her notes app to a list labeled “BABY TIMELINE.” Third item down, highlighted in pale yellow: 2 more big trips before we stop birth control. She and her partner Sam had just gotten home from 10 days in coastal Italy, their second international vacation in 12 months. Everyone at her office kept telling her to get all the travel out now, that once the baby came she wouldn’t sleep in a hotel that didn’t have a mini fridge full of breast milk for three years minimum. She looked up at me, a smudge of sunscreen still behind her ear from the prior weekend’s lake trip, and said, “Is it stupid to wait six more months just for the Japan trip we’ve been planning since college? Am I being selfish?”
I got the question. Back in 2018, my husband and I were in the exact same spot. We’d knocked out a long weekend in Montreal and a week of backcountry camping in Banff within six months, and we’d originally planned to start trying the week we got home from Alberta. Then a distant relative pulled me aside at a bridal shower and told me we’d regret rushing it, that those last carefree trips were the glue that would get us through colicky months and sleep regressions. We pushed our timeline back seven months to book a two-week self-drive trip around New Zealand. I got a positive pregnancy test six weeks after we dragged our suitcases back through the front door.
That suitcase sat by the entryway for three weeks, for the record. First-trimester nausea hit so hard I couldn’t bend over to unzip it without dry heaving into the coat rack. But the memories from that trip stuck around far longer than the smell of camp smoke that lingered on our hiking socks.
Most of the conversation around this question frames it as a tradeoff: you either get your fun in now, or you sacrifice it for a baby. But that misses the actual practical question most people are dancing around: how much rest and relational reserve do you need to build before you take on the 24/7 work of caring for a newborn? It’s not a selfish question. Burnout in the first year of parenting doesn’t just make you tired. It makes it harder to roll with random 2 a.m. wake-ups, unexpected feeding struggles, the weeks where no one in the house sleeps more than two hours straight. It seeps into how you talk to your partner, and how you show up for the tiny person completely dependent on you.
I talked to enough new parents at my local playground during my son Leo’s first year to see how this shakes out differently for everyone. Zoe, whose daughter is three months older than Leo, got pregnant three weeks after her wedding. They’d been saving for a down payment and couldn’t afford to take any time off beyond a long weekend, and she went into parenthood fully expecting to hit the ground running. By the time her daughter turned 8 months old, she told me she’d snap at her partner over nothing more than a misplaced coffee mug, and she couldn’t name one thing she’d done just for herself in six months. They hadn’t had a single stretch of unstructured, no-obligation time together in more than two years, and the load of a new baby emptied a reserve that was already running on fumes.
On the other end, a college friend pushed her pregnancy timeline back two full years to check off four big international trips, from Peru to Iceland. She walked into childbirth with a camera roll full of photos and no remaining “bucket list” items she felt she was missing. But by month three postpartum, she texted me saying she was bored out of her mind. She’d spent two years framing every trip as her last shot at fun, and once the baby came, she had nothing small to look forward to, no assumption that joy could fit into her new life. She’d grieved a loss that didn’t actually have to happen.
There’s no magic number of vacations that means you’re “ready” to try. But over the years, I’ve picked up a few low-lift ways to work through the question that don’t involve scrolling 10-year-old forum threads from people with totally different finances and fertility timelines.
First, pull up your calendar from the last three months and count the full, unstructured days where neither you nor your partner had to answer a work message, run a mandatory errand, or meet someone else’s deadline. Don’t count your last couple of vacations if half each day was spent Slack-checking or taking work calls in the hotel bathroom. If you already have two or three of those low-obligation days a month, even if they’re just spent hiking a local trail or ordering takeout on the couch with your phones off, adding two more 10-day international trips won’t build that much more long-term reserve. If those last two vacations were the only full days off you’ve had in 18 months, waiting a little while to build up more rest isn’t selfish—it’s just common sense.
Second, if you do decide to wait for more trips, drop the “last chance” language. So many people refer to pre-baby travel as the end of fun, and that framing sticks with you long after the baby arrives. When we planned our New Zealand trip, we intentionally didn’t call it a last hurrah. We just called it our fall trip, and we talked about the trips we wanted to take with a kid later, even if they looked different. Last year, we took 7-year-old Leo to that same stretch of coastal Italy Mia visited. We stopped every 90 minutes for gelato, skipped the art museum I’d been wanting to see to spend three hours at a neighborhood playground, and he threw up on my white sneakers on the train back from Naples. It wasn’t the trip I would have taken without him, but it was still a good trip. Travel doesn’t end when you have kids—it just gets messier.
Mia texted me last week with her tentative call. They ran the numbers and realized Japan would push their start date to next fall, which she’s comfortable with from a fertility standpoint, but they also noticed both their Italy trip and the vacation before that were half eaten up by last-minute work requests, because their teams are short-staffed right now. Instead of waiting the full six months for the international trip, they’re booking two three-day weekends at a cabin two hours from home this fall, laptops locked in the glove box the whole time. They’ll start trying in January, and plan to do Japan when their kid is old enough to walk around a temple without a meltdown, probably around age 6.
For what it’s worth, I still go back and forth on my own choice sometimes. If we’d skipped New Zealand and started trying as planned, Leo would be almost a year older, and we’d likely be further along on our own down payment savings. But when I was rocking him through that six-week stretch of 45-minute night wakings when he was 4 months old, I’d pull up the photo of us sitting on that empty New Zealand beach, both of us sunburned, reading trashy paperbacks, and it didn’t make the tired go away. It just reminded me I knew what rest felt like, and that I’d get back to it eventually. There’s no perfect timeline, just the one that leaves you enough reserve to be kind to yourself, and the new person you’re bringing into the world.
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