My sister-in-law called me last week from the parking lot of a CVS, which is where she does all her serious thinking. She’d just picked up a pregnancy test but hadn’t taken it yet. Instead, she was standing between a minivan and a sedan, asking me whether she should put it back on the shelf and wait a few more months.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “We’ve got two big trips booked. Cancun in March, and then a week in Portugal in June. If I get pregnant now, I’ll be miserable for both of them. I’ll be throwing up in a beach cabana, and then I’ll be too exhausted to even look at the ocean. Should we just wait? Take the vacations first, and then try?”
I laughed because I remembered having that exact conversation with my husband about eight years ago. We had a trip to Japan planned, and I was obsessed with the idea that I needed to go before I got pregnant, because obviously, once you have a kid, you never do anything fun again. We spent a solid month debating whether to delay trying, as if the calendar were some kind of oracle that could tell us the perfect moment to conceive. In the end, we went to Japan, I didn’t get pregnant that month, and then we spent six more months trying anyway, which meant I did plenty of sitting at home with a thermometer and not nearly enough spontaneous travel.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about the “wait until after the vacation” plan: it assumes getting pregnant is a light switch you can turn on whenever you choose. But for a lot of us, it’s more like a dimmer switch that flickers unpredictably. You might wait three months and get pregnant immediately. You might wait a year and wonder if you made a terrible mistake putting your life on hold for a beach weekend.
I didn’t say any of that to my sister-in-law right away. Instead, I just asked her about the trips. What were they really for? She said they’d been planning Cancun for two years—it was a friends’ group thing, a bunch of them from college. The Portugal trip was just her and her husband, a “babymoon before the baby” even though there was no baby yet. She wanted to feel like herself one more time, she said. Like a person who could pick up and go without packing a diaper bag.
I know that feeling. I’ve had it in the middle of every major stage of parenting. You think if you can just get one more break, one more trip, one more night of unbroken sleep, you’ll be ready for the next thing. But then the next thing comes anyway, and you find that you were ready and not ready at the same time, and somehow that’s fine.
Here’s what I actually told her, and I think it’s what she needed to hear. We did take the Japan trip, and it was amazing. We ate ramen at midnight, we hiked through bamboo forests, we sat in a tiny bar where nobody spoke English and we pointed at things to order. And I remember thinking, on the plane home, “Okay, now I can do this.” I felt like I’d gotten it out of my system.
But then we didn’t get pregnant for another eight months. And during those eight months, we didn’t take any more trips, because we were saving money and waiting, and I was so focused on the whole project that I stopped letting myself plan anything fun. I look back at those months now and I think about all the weekends we stayed home, all the local places we didn’t visit, all the little adventures we put off because we were waiting for a big one. The pregnancy eventually happened, and the baby came, and we had a newborn who screamed in the car, and suddenly we were the parents sitting at home while our friends posted photos from places with palm trees.
The travel didn’t stop permanently, but it changed. Our first trip with our son, when he was ten months old, was a two-hour drive to a lake house. It took us six hours because we had to stop every time he cried. We brought a pack-and-play, a bottle warmer, a white noise machine, and about three times more diapers than we thought possible. It wasn’t Cancun. But it was something. And after that, we got better at it. We learned to lower our expectations and raise our flexibility.
Here’s the practical part, and I’m sharing it because I wish someone had walked me through this. First, check your airline’s policy on pregnancy. Most allow you to fly up to 36 weeks for domestic flights, and 28 to 32 weeks for international ones, but you need a doctor’s note after a certain point. That gives you more time than you think. Second, morning sickness, as the name suggests, is not confined to the morning, but it usually peaks around weeks 8 to 12. So if you’re planning a trip, look at the gestational age you’d be. Are you going to be right in the thick of the first trimester during that beach vacation? That might genuinely be miserable. But if you’re going to be around 20 weeks, that’s often the sweet spot. You’re past the nausea, you’re not so big that you can’t move, and you still have energy.
My friend Emma traveled to Italy at 22 weeks pregnant. She ate her way through Florence, took a cooking class, and walked ten miles a day. She said it was one of her favorite trips ever. Another friend did a road trip along the California coast at 30 weeks and spent most of it looking for restrooms. Every person is different, and every pregnancy is different.
So yes, there’s a medical and logistical side to the question. But there’s also the part that’s harder to plan for. Waiting for the “right time” can become a habit. You wait to take the trip, then you wait to get pregnant, then you wait for the baby to sleep through the night, then you wait for them to be old enough to enjoy Disney World, and then suddenly they’re in high school and you’re wondering where the time went. There’s a reason the phrase “one more trip” feels so seductive. It gives us the illusion of control over an inherently uncontrollable process.
I didn’t tell my sister-in-law to cancel her vacations. I told her to think about what she’d be giving up if she waited, and what she’d be gaining. If she feels like she’s not ready emotionally to be pregnant on a beach, that’s valid. If she’s worried about a bump in her wedding photos, that’s valid too. But if she’s waiting because she thinks a baby will completely ruin her ability to travel, she needs to talk to more parents, because we’re out here doing it, badly but happily.
Finally, I told her something I learned the hard way. After the Japan trip, we took a weekend in a nearby city when I was pregnant and exhausted. We didn’t do anything special. We ate soft scrambled eggs at a diner and watched a movie in a hotel bed. And I loved it. It was the last time it was just the two of us in a quiet room, and I didn’t know that until later. You never know which ordinary moment is actually a milestone.
She texted me the next morning. She said she took the test, and it was negative. She wasn’t pregnant, not yet. They were going to Cancun as planned, and they’d see what happened after. I told her that sounded exactly right.
I’m still not sure if waiting or not waiting is the better answer. It depends on the person, the pregnancy, the trip. But I’ve learned that the question itself—”should I wait?”—is not really about the vacations. It’s about trying to make a decision when you’re not the one in control. And sometimes the kindest thing you can do is stop trying to control it and just buy the sunscreen. You’ll need it regardless.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My sister-in-law called me last week from the parking lot of a CVS, which is where she does all her serious thinking