Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned When I Didn’t Wait
The plastic security bin clattered to the conveyor belt, and my 2-year-old Lila burst into tears because I’d made her put her floppy stuffed rabbit in it instead of carrying him through the metal detector. I was 10 weeks pregnant, my jeans already unbuttoned under an oversized hoodie, and I could taste the sour lemon candy I’d been sucking on to hold back morning sickness. Six weeks earlier, my husband Sam and I had sat at this exact airport’s food court after booking a long weekend in Maine with friends and a 10-day trip to Portugal two months later, talking through whether we should start trying for our second right away, or wait until both trips were behind us. I’d typed the question into my phone’s search bar at 10 p.m. that night: should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations? Most results covered Zika risk and airline policies, but none mentioned security line meltdowns, naptime schedules, or the quiet guilt of not being able to show up for the kid you already have the way you planned.
We landed on not waiting, for boring, practical reasons. We’d already pushed our timeline for a second kid back twice, first for pandemic lockdowns, then for Sam’s work promotion. The trips were non-refundable, and everyone we knew said it can take six months or a year to get pregnant anyway; why put life on hold for a hypothetical? If it happened, we figured, we’d deal with a little tiredness. People travel pregnant all the time.
I got pregnant on the second cycle of trying.
The Maine trip was the harder of the two. We’d booked a group cabin with college friends, all couples with kids Lila’s age, and the itinerary was built around the things we used to do pre-kid: early morning blueberry hikes, sunset lobster bakes, late-night board games. Our bedroom was a loft up a rickety ladder, and the smell of fried bacon from the kitchen at 8 a.m. sent me straight to the bathroom most days. I bailed on the three-mile hike our second full day, and when Lila insisted I carry her up the first steep section instead of Sam, I had to tell her I couldn’t. She stopped on the trail, crossed her arms, and asked if my legs were broken. Sam ended up carrying her, and she cried halfway back to the cabin because she only wants me when she’s overtired. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch eating saltines, watching her chase the cabin cat around the yard, while everyone else was gone.
One of the other moms, who has two boys 18 months apart, found me flipping through a magazine and sat down. She got pregnant with her second right before her sister’s destination bachelorette, and spent the whole rehearsal dinner hiding in the bathroom. “I still can’t smell champagne without feeling a little green,” she said, “but I couldn’t tell you a single thing I missed at that dinner now. What I do remember is getting three whole slow days with my first before his brother came, when I didn’t have to split my attention.”
I rolled that thought around through the lead-up to Portugal. By that point I was 16 weeks, the worst nausea had faded, but I tired out by 2 p.m. daily, and my feet swelled if I walked more than a couple of miles. We’d originally booked a tiny third-floor walkup in Lisbon and planned a 5-mile coastal hike, plus a boat trip to the sea caves Lila had obsessed over from her picture book for months. Before we left, we made small, boring changes that ended up making the whole trip work: we paid the $80 difference to swap to a ground-floor apartment with a patio, cut every activity requiring more than two hours of continuous walking, and booked a rental car instead of relying solely on public transit. I packed a separate crossbody just for me: ginger chews, an extra water bottle, a foldable canvas stool, and stretchy slip-on sneakers a half size bigger than my usual shoes.
We also practiced talking to Lila in the simplest terms possible, no vague lines about mommy being tired. Every night for a week before we left, we’d say, “Mommy has a tiny baby growing in her belly. Sometimes we will stop to sit and have snack earlier, and sometimes daddy will carry you. That is just how this trip works.” She didn’t fully grasp it at first, but by our third day in Lisbon, when I stopped halfway up a hill to catch my breath, she patted my arm and said, “Baby in belly. Sit snack.”
We skipped the long hike and the sea cave trip, the things I’d been most excited for on paper. Instead, we spent three hours at a scuffed public playground 10 minutes from our apartment, where Lila made friends with a little Portuguese girl her age. Neither spoke a word of the other’s language, but they chased pigeons and shared goldfish crackers like they’d known each other for years. We went to the pastel de nata cooking class we’d booked, and the instructor let Lila stand on a stool next to me and pour all the cinnamon. We still have a blurry photo of her covered in cinnamon dust from eyebrow to chin stuck to our fridge.
When people ask me now whether they should wait to get pregnant until after their pre-planned vacations, I never give a yes or no answer. First, I always tell them to call their OB or midwife before making the call, especially for international travel: some regions still have Zika risk, and providers can give clear guidance based on your personal health history and trimester. That’s non-negotiable, no matter how low-risk your pregnancy is.
Beyond that, the decision has almost nothing to do with whether travel while pregnant is “possible” and everything to do with what you actually want out of those trips. I tell people to skip the 20-item itinerary and write down the three things that actually matter. If those three things are sitting by a pool catching up with friends, eating good bread, and watching your toddler chase birds, you can probably do that even moving slower than planned. If one of those non-negotiables is a 10-mile backcountry hike you’ve trained a year for, or a bachelorette weekend built around late nights and wine tasting, there’s no shame in waiting three more months. Fertility doesn’t drop off a cliff after one extra cycle, and no one gets a prize for checking “try for baby” off the list as fast as possible.
I still have twinges of regret sometimes. I see photos from that Maine lobster bake, everyone holding paper plates and grinning with sunburned cheeks, and I wish I’d gotten to be there. I never got that mythical “last carefree trip” people talk about, where you can wander a city after dark without checking your watch for naptime or sip vinho verde without thinking about your caffeine intake. That tradeoff doesn’t disappear just because the good parts were also good.
Last weekend, we were back at that same Maine lake for a visit, Lila now 3 and my belly 32 weeks round. She dragged her stuffed rabbit down to the shore by herself, then ran back and patted my leg, asking if I wanted to sit on the towel and eat goldfish while she built sandcastles for the new baby. I said yes. She still talks about the Lisbon playground more than any trip we’ve taken since. We still don’t know what life with two kids will look like, or if we’ll ever take that sea cave trip we planned. For now, though, the goldfish and the cinnamon photo and the rabbit with the slightly chewed ear feel like enough.
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