Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Couple Vacations? What I Learned Planning Baby 2
The olive oil-stained kitchen table held three things that Tuesday night: two printed booking confirmations for a long weekend in Asheville in May and a beach trip with my sister’s family in July, a 10-pack of ovulation test strips I’d picked up at Target that afternoon, and our 16-month-old daughter Lila’s half-eaten pouch of sweet potato puffs. Sam leaned against the counter drying a sippy cup, and nodded at the spread. “If we start now, I swear we’ll end up with you puking through the mountain hikes and both of us too exhausted to chase her on the sand. If we wait, that puts the kids almost three years apart. My mom swears two years apart is perfect, they’ll grow up playing together.”
That’s the question I see posted in every local parenting group at least once a month: should I put pregnancy on hold until after a couple pre-planned vacations, or just start trying now? Everyone had a take for us back then. My OB had noted at my last annual that 18 months between birth and next conception is the general sweet spot for uterine recovery, which would have put us starting that April, right between the two trips. My best friend, who had her kids 17 months apart, said she can’t remember a single full night of sleep between 2019 and 2022, and never got a low-stakes trip just the three of them before her second was born. A mom from Lila’s playgroup sniffed and said waiting for vacations was selfish, that the sooner you power through the hard baby years the better.
We ended up tucking the ovulation tests in the back of the bathroom cabinet and waiting. Neither trip was the perfect, glowing “last hurrah” social media promises. Lila came down with an ear infection 12 hours after we got to the beach, and we spent three hours in a strip mall urgent care while rain poured outside. In Asheville, the cabin’s hot tub was broken the whole weekend, and we burned the pancakes we tried to make over the camp stove one morning. But the small, unremarkable parts stuck. We put Lila to bed in her pack n play at 7:30, same as her bedtime at home, and sat on the cabin porch drinking hard cider for an hour without scrolling daycare waitlist forums or talking about speech therapy milestones. On the beach, Sam and I took turns wandering the boardwalk alone for 45 minutes each, and I got a cheap beach massage while he and my sister chased the kids up and down the shore. I didn’t have to stop halfway through a hike to catch my breath from third trimester pelvic pain, or skip the cider because I was pregnant, or bow out of a walk because my feet swelled up too bad to wear shoes.
When we went in for our pre-conception checkup at the end of July, after both trips were done, I asked our OB if waiting the extra four months had raised our physical risk. She flipped through my chart and shrugged: the 18-month guideline is a minimum for most low-risk people, not a hard deadline. If you’re under 35 with no history of pregnancy complications, adding three to six months of waiting for a trip, a move, or a work promotion barely moves the needle on risk. It’s not a one-size-fits-all number, no matter how many people online treat it like one.
We started trying that week, got pregnant that September, and our son Jude was born in June 2023, when Lila was 2 years and 3 months old. That extra seven months between when we first considered trying and when Jude was born made more of a difference for our daily life than I ever expected, and most of it had nothing to do with the vacations. At her two-year well visit, I mentioned the spacing debate to her pediatrician, and she leaned against the exam table and broke it down simply: most 18-month-olds, the age Lila would have been when a new baby arrived if we’d started in April, can’t communicate more than a handful of words, still need help with every basic self-care task, and are right in the thick of peak separation anxiety. They can’t tell you they need a drink of water, can’t pull their own pants up to use the potty, and can’t play independently for 10 minutes while you nurse a newborn. By 2 and a half, Lila could do all of those things. When I was 8 months pregnant and could barely bend over, she grabbed her own snack from the bottom shelf of the fridge. When Jude was born and I was stuck under him for 45 minutes at a time during cluster feeds, she sat next to us and flipped through board books by herself, no screaming for my attention every two minutes. That’s not a trivial difference when you’re running on four hours of broken sleep.
There are real tradeoffs to waiting, and I’d be lying if I said I never second-guessed it. Sam got laid off unexpectedly between the two trips, and for a week we talked about scrapping the beach trip and starting to try immediately, convinced nothing in life was guaranteed enough to wait for. I was 32 when we got pregnant, and I still refreshed my fertility app every month while we waited, worrying even a few months would hurt our chances. Right now, at 3 and a half and 6 months, Lila mostly sees Jude as a tiny intruder who drools on her artwork and steals her stuffed animals, not the built-in playmate I see closer-spaced kids have at this age. That may shift as he gets older, but right now, it’s the reality.
For anyone sitting at their own kitchen table staring at trip confirmations and ovulation tests, the low-effort exercise that helped us stop looping on other people’s rules was simple: we got a sheet of notebook paper and folded it in half. On one side, we wrote specific, tangible things we would give up if we didn’t wait, no vague lines about “last taste of freedom.” Ours were: we want to do the 5-mile hike we’ve planned without stopping for nausea, we want to have a beer at dinner without checking pregnancy guidelines, we don’t want to chase a tired toddler around the beach while I’m already exhausted from growing another baby. On the other side, we wrote the specific costs of waiting. For us that list was short, but for other people it can include age-related fertility drops, an upcoming cross-country move that’s easier to navigate before a baby arrives, or a daycare sibling discount that saves hundreds of dollars a month if you enroll the second baby sooner.
You don’t even need fancy, expensive vacations for the wait to be worth it. Friends of ours who couldn’t afford two trips out of town did two $50 weekend campouts an hour from their house, put their toddler to bed in the tent, and sat by the fire talking the same way we did in Asheville. The point was never checking trips off a bucket list. It was giving ourselves one short, defined stretch where we didn’t add the unpredictable physical and mental load of pregnancy to the load we were already carrying as parents of a toddler. Plenty of people travel happily through pregnancy, and plenty of people have healthy, happy kids with 18 months between them. But pregnancy is unpredictable: 70% of people get first trimester nausea, 1 in 4 have first trimester bleeding, and there’s no way to plan around how your body will handle it. Travel insurance can cover a canceled hotel, but it can’t give you back the time you wanted to spend present with the people you love, stuck in a bathroom instead.
Last weekend, we folded laundry on the couch while Lila showed Jude how to stack plastic rings on his play mat. He grabbed one and gummed it, and for once she didn’t yell or yank it away, just laughed and wiped drool off his cheek. Sam glanced over and said, remember when we spent that whole night stressing about those two trips? I said I did. Most days I can’t even remember what restaurant we ate at in Asheville. Sometimes I still see photos of families with two kids close in age, all bundled up for apple picking together, and wonder what that version of our life would have looked like. But I never look back at that choice and wish we’d skipped the trips to start trying sooner. It wasn’t the universal right answer, but it was the right one for the two tired people sitting at that stained kitchen table, not quite ready to shift everything just yet.
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