Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
It was 7:12 on a Tuesday, I was kneeling on the kitchen floor pulling a load of towels out of the dryer, and a chipped ceramic sea turtle tumbled out of the pocket of my old hiking shorts. Goldfish crumbs stuck to the knee of my sweatpants, and my 18-month-old Junie looked up from the cardboard box she was coloring on and held out her hand for it. That turtle was the souvenir from the second of two trips my partner Sam and I booked in 2021, when we pushed back our timeline to start trying for a baby by three months, just to get a couple more vacations in first.
We hadn’t even been planning to wait. I’d just gotten my IUD removed, we’d mapped out our budget for daycare and a new crib, and we were ready to stop preventing pregnancy. Then, in the span of one week, two different coworkers pulled me aside at separate baby showers and said the same line: Get all your trips in now. You won’t pee alone for five years.
That night over takeout pizza, Sam pulled up hotel booking sites. We had $1,900 saved in our “random fun” account, separate from the $5,000 we’d set aside for baby insurance deductibles and gear. We could do two cheap trips, he said, no fancy resorts, no international flights. One backcountry hiking trip to Olympic National Park over Labor Day, one week in an $800 screened-in cottage on Florida’s Gulf Coast in late September. We’d start trying October 15, no extensions. I said yes before he finished talking.
It wasn’t the polished, Instagram-ready last hurrah people talk about. It rained 11 out of 14 days we were in Washington. We forgot the coffee filters on the first day and boiled grounds in a pot like campers from 1970, and Sam slipped off a muddy log crossing a stream and soaked through every layer he brought. We spent two hours lost on an unmarked side trail, and by the time we found our way back to the car, we were laughing so hard we could barely breathe. We didn’t talk about baby names or car seat safety or parental leave once. Most of our conversations were about the way pine trees smelled after rain, whether our old apartment neighbor still left cat food out for raccoons, and what flavor of gas station granola bar we wanted for lunch the next day.
Florida was slower. We walked the beach at 8 a.m. before the crowds showed up, ate key lime pie from a roadside stand every night after dinner, and slept nine hours straight most nights. I finished two whole novels that had nothing to do with pregnancy or parenting. We didn’t set an alarm once.
We got pregnant the second cycle after we got home. Junie was born the following July, and the first year was every bit as messy as people warned. She had colic for 12 weeks. She brought home six different viruses from daycare in her first six months, and one January she ran a 103 fever for 10 straight days, and we took 90-minute shifts sitting with her on the couch through the night. There were nights we stood in the kitchen at 2 a.m. both covered in spit up, too tired to say more than two words to each other.
People ask us all the time if it was worth waiting for those two trips. Some of our friends got pregnant the second they felt ready, skipped all pre-baby travel, and say they don’t regret it for a second. Others pushed their timeline back for a big European vacation, put half of it on a credit card, and spent the first year of their baby’s life stressing about monthly payments more than they enjoyed the memories from the trip.
What no one tells you when you’re debating this question is that it’s never really about the vacations. It’s about stored, low-stakes bandwidth. When you’re caring for a small child, every hour of your day is spent responding to someone else’s needs: wipe this, read that, fix the snack, soothe the cry. Even date nights after baby usually revolve around coordinating who’s picking up the kid from daycare and whether the pediatrician called back about that rash. You don’t get a lot of time to just be two people who like hanging out with each other, no to-do list attached.
Those two trips didn’t “lock in” our old lives or anything silly like that. We love taking Junie camping and to the beach now; we brought her back to that same Florida cottage this spring, and she spent three hours chasing seagulls and eating sand, and it was better than either of our pre-baby trips in a dozen ways. But what those 12 weeks gave us was a stack of tiny, stupid, happy memories we can pull out when everything feels too heavy. When we were up with Junie’s fever that January, Sam started telling the story of slipping in that mud puddle, and I laughed so hard I snort-laughed even though I could barely keep my eyes open. That 30 seconds of lightness made the whole rest of the shift easier.
I’ve talked to enough other parents to know that stored-up little moments like that matter more than any fancy nursery. When you’re running on fumes, you snap faster over spilled juice. You don’t have the patience to stack the same block tower 12 times in a row after work, the quiet repetition that helps toddlers feel safe and seen as they learn how the world works. It’s not that you’re a bad parent if you don’t take pre-baby trips. It’s that going through a huge life transition with a little extra reserve built in never hurts.
If you’re on the fence right now, there are a few small, grounded rules I’d pass on from what we did, and what I watched work for friends. First, don’t touch your baby safety net to pay for the trips. We paid for every cent out of our separate fun savings, no credit cards, no dipping into the money we set aside for insurance deductibles or lost wages during leave. If two big trips don’t fit that budget, don’t push pregnancy back for something you can’t afford. Two unplanned long weekends camping an hour from town, with your work email turned off, work just as well as a trip across the world. The point isn’t the location, it’s the unstructured time with no one asking anything from you.
Second, set a hard stop date before you book anything. We wrote October 15 on a sticky note and stuck it to the fridge, and we never talked about extending it. A friend of mine pushed her timeline back “for one more trip” three separate times, and by the third trip she said she couldn’t even enjoy it, because she was stressing the whole time about wasting fertile years and putting her life on hold. Vacations are supposed to be a break, not a way to keep delaying a transition you already feel ready for.
Third, don’t buy the line that this is your last chance to ever do anything fun. Travel with kids is different, but it’s not worse. You just have different stories to tell afterward.
Junie chewed on the sea turtle’s flipper for a minute, then held it up to me. “Beach?” she said. I told her we’d go back soon. Sam walked in the door with tacos for dinner, saw the turtle, and immediately launched into the mud puddle story again, like he doesn’t tell it at least once a month. Junie dropped the turtle back into the laundry basket and went back to scribbling purple crayon all over the cardboard.
We still go back and forth about whether we’ll do the same thing if we try for a second kid. Some months we feel like we have enough reserve built up to go for it next year. Other months we’re both eating cereal over the sink at 8:30 p.m. after bedtime, and we pull up the national park website and talk about two more weeks of hiking first. There’s no perfect answer, just the one that doesn’t leave you choosing between a memory you can’t afford and a baby you’re already ready for.
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