Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Real Mom’s Honest Take
The screen door of our Gulf Shores rental stuck halfway when I pushed it, fine sand grinding in the track, and I held my breath so I wouldn’t wake our napping 2-year-old curled on the pullout couch. It was the last night of our first low-stress vacation since she was born, and my husband was leaning against the linoleum counter, twisting the cap off a lime seltzer, when he nodded at my phone where my period tracker glowed open. “You still thinking we toss the birth control pills when we get home?” he asked.
I stared out at the dunes for a minute. We already had two more non-refundable trips locked into the calendar: a long weekend in a Vermont cabin in October with our college friend group, and 10 days in Puerto Rico over Christmas to visit his 82-year-old abuela. Every friend I’d talked to said the same thing: wait. Don’t be 8 weeks pregnant and nauseous on a leaf-peeping hike, don’t skip abuela’s famous rum-spiked coquito, don’t waste the trips you’ve been saving for two years on first-trimester exhaustion. One friend told a story about spending three of five days of her Paris trip in a hotel bathroom, and said she’d never get that money or time back.
That night I texted my sister, who has two boys 22 months apart, for a second opinion. She sent back a blurry photo of her 4-year-old covered in spaghetti sauce, her 1-year-old chewing on a TV remote, and wrote: “Wait for the damn trips. You don’t get that one-on-one time back.”
That line stuck with me. Up until then, I’d only thought about the question in terms of my own comfort: what I’d be able to drink, how far I’d be able to walk, how tired I’d be. No one I’d talked to had framed it around our daughter, who was 2 and a half, deep in that phase where she only wanted me to put her shoes on, only me to read the same short Paw Patrol book every night, only me to lift her up to see the birds at the park. I’d spent so much time prepping her for a new sibling that I hadn’t stopped to think about what early pregnancy actually takes from the small, daily stuff that matters to a toddler.
We ended up waiting. I stayed on birth control through both trips, and tossed the pack the night we flew back to Chicago.
Vermont was crisp, the kind of cold that makes your nose run, and our daughter spent four hours straight collecting acorns on our hike, tucking every smooth one into her jacket pocket. Our friends took turns holding her hand when she tired, and after she fell asleep on the cabin couch, we stayed up late by the fire drinking spiced cider, no baby monitor, no rushing home for a bedtime feeding. In Puerto Rico, abuela took her down to the beach at 8 a.m. every day before the crowds showed up, let her feed bits of her breakfast arroz con gandules to the stray cats, taught her how to say mariposa slow enough that she could repeat it. I didn’t have to stop every 20 minutes to pee, or sit down on a curb because I got lightheaded, or beg off a walk because I was too tired to move. All the slow, unplanned attention was hers.
I thought about that a few months later, when I was 10 weeks pregnant and spent three straight Sundays on the couch, too nauseous to walk to the playground down the street. I zoned out during bedtime stories, let my husband handle baths and shoe-tying for six weeks, and ordered frozen pizza more nights than I care to admit. But those two big, promised trips went exactly the way I’d told her they would, when I showed her photos on my phone months in advance. She still keeps the chipped acorn she brought home from Vermont on her bedroom windowsill, and brings up chasing lizards on abuela’s beach at least once a week.
I know the other side works too, because my friend Lila did the opposite. She got pregnant two months before a three-week trip to Japan with her 3-year-old, and had almost no morning sickness, just enough tiredness that she was happy to head back to the hotel by 8 every night. The trip ended up being perfect practice for the new baby: her son learned to grab his own snack from the diaper bag when she needed to sit on a train bench, hold the subway pole by himself when she didn’t have a free hand, and started telling strangers at temples he was going to be a big brother, months before she would have brought it up at home. He adjusted to his little sister faster than any kid I know, but she missed the traditional tea ceremony they booked six months in advance, after waking up throwing up that morning. She doesn’t regret it, but photos don’t show how much time she spent resting while her husband took their son exploring alone.
After talking to half a dozen other moms who’ve been on both sides, I’ve stopped saying there’s one right answer, but there are a few small, specific things worth weighing that never come up in generic pregnancy debates. It’s almost never about cocktails or fancy dinners. First, ask who the trips are for. If it’s an adult backpacking weekend with friends, and your kid is staying home with grandma anyway, a little nausea only impacts you. If it’s the Disney trip you’ve been showing them clips of for six months, or the first trip to meet family they’ve only seen on FaceTime, that’s the kind of memory little kids don’t get a do-over for. It’s hard to explain mommy can’t go on the teacups because her stomach hurts, when they’ve been counting down for months.
Second, don’t ignore what you already know about your body. I had hyperemesis with my first, threw up four or five times a day until 16 weeks, and knew I couldn’t handle 10 days of 85-degree heat and walking Old San Juan feeling like that. Lila had barely any symptoms her first pregnancy, so rolling the dice made sense for her. You don’t have to base this choice on a stranger’s horror story.
Third, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. One coworker had a trip booked two months after she planned to start trying, so she used condoms for one cycle to avoid peak nausea while traveling, then started trying again the day after she got home. She only pushed her timeline out four weeks, no dramatic delay, and got pregnant the first try. I spent three months stressing about “wasting time” waiting, and it never occurred to me I could shift things that small.
My son is 8 months old now. Last week my daughter dragged a crumpled photo of her and abuela on the Puerto Rico beach off the fridge, and said, “That was when it was just me and you and Daddy, before baby.” I sat down next to her, and for a second I felt that sharp little twist of gladness that we waited. But I still see Lila’s photos, of her two boys stacking blocks on the living room floor, her older one handing the baby every third block like it’s a very important gift, and I know that worked just as well for them.
No one’s plans line up perfectly, anyway. We got lucky and got pregnant the first cycle after we got home, but I know people who waited for that last vacation and then took 18 months to conceive, ending up with a bigger age gap than they planned. That’s fine too, it’s just a tradeoff no one warns you about when you’re scrolling ovulation apps on a rental porch at sunset. Last night, my daughter brought her chipped acorn to the dinner table, and told her brother all about the “big trees far away” where she found it. He gurgled and grabbed for it, and she held it just out of reach, laughing. For us, that was enough. There’s still no universal right answer, just the one that fits the small, messy life you already have.
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