Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Planned Vacations? Advice From One Mom
My coffee’s gone cold on the kitchen table, my 18-month-old is squirming on my lap and mashing banana crumbs into the thigh of my sweatpants, when my best friend Lila’s text pops up. It’s a screenshot of two confirmation emails: one for a spring Costa Rica rainforest tour, one for a fall Portugal city break. The follow-up reads: “We’re ready to start trying. Should I wait to get pregnant until after both? What would you do?”
I remember being in her exact spot, five years ago. My husband and I had booked a backcountry camping trip to the Canadian Rockies that summer, followed by a destination beach wedding in Mexico four months later. We’d talked about starting a family for six months, and every mom I followed online was saying the same thing: just wait, get your last big trips out of the way before you’re tied down. Why risk spending your dream vacation hunched over a hotel bathroom toilet with morning sickness? So we waited.
We broke in new hiking boots, packed my favorite dehydrated chili recipe, and spent 10 days sleeping under the stars. We saw a moose 100 yards from our tent, drank too much cheap pinot noir around the campfire, and hiked until our calves ached. Four months later, I laid on a Mexican beach for eight straight hours, finished an entire novel, and only got up to refill my margarita or use the bathroom. It was perfect, exactly what everyone said it should be. Then we got home, canceled our birth control, and started trying. It took 18 months. I had one miscarriage in that stretch. If we’d skipped the wait, we would have had our son a full year and a half earlier. That extra time of waiting hurt a lot more than a little morning sickness on a camping trip ever would have.
But I also have my cousin Mia, who made the opposite choice when she was in the same spot five years ago. She and her husband had a two-week national park road trip planned, and they decided not to wait. She got a positive pregnancy test two weeks before they left. She spent the first week throwing up in every rest stop bathroom, had to skip three of the big hikes she’d been planning for a year, and cut the trip two days short because she couldn’t keep up with the itinerary. When I asked her if she regretted it last Christmas, she shook her head. Her daughter just turned four, and they’ve already taken three more road trips as a family. If she’d waited, she says, she’d be two years behind on being a mom, and that’s not a trade she would ever make.
I wipe banana crumbs off my phone screen and think about the practical stuff I wish someone had spelled out for me, instead of just repeating the “wait for your last hurrah” line. First, almost all standard travel insurance covers pregnancy-related cancellation or interruption up to 24 weeks. That’s a $30 to $50 add-on for most trips, and it wipes out almost all the financial risk if you end up needing to cancel or cut things short. If you’re on the fence, buy the insurance first. That’s one concrete step that takes a lot of the pressure off.
Second, write down two quick lists before you decide. On the first, write the actual specific downsides of getting pregnant before your trips. It’s not “my whole trip is ruined.” It’s “I might have to turn my 10-mile Cinque Terre hike into a 2-mile walk along the shore. I might need to stop for bathroom breaks every hour. I might have to cancel entirely if I have a high-risk pregnancy.” On the second list, write the specific downsides of waiting. For some people, that’s “we’ll be trying when I’m two years older, which lowers our chances of getting pregnant easily.” For others, it’s “we’ll have to push back our timeline for having a second kid if this one takes a while.” It’s easy to only think about the bad parts of getting pregnant early, but most people don’t stop to write out the bad parts of waiting. I didn’t, and that was my mistake.
Third, there’s a middle ground if you really can’t decide. You can start trying, but avoid unprotected sex the week before you leave if you know you’d be miserable getting sick mid-trip. That cuts down on the risk of being newly pregnant when you travel, without putting your whole timeline on hold for a year.
The myth that you need to get all your fun vacations in before you have kids never made much sense to me now that I’m here. I thought after I had my son, I’d never get to go on a relaxing trip again. But we’ve gone camping, we’ve gone to the beach, we’ve gone to visit family out of state. It’s different. We bring a pack n play, we leave the park an hour early for naps, we eat more chicken nuggets than fancy restaurant meals. But it’s still fun. It’s just different fun.
I text Lila back all of this, no fancy advice, just what I’ve seen. By the time I hit send, my son has crawled off my lap and is chewing on my phone charging cord, so I move him to the play mat with a stack of board books. She texts back an hour later that she booked the travel insurance add-on for both trips, and they’re starting trying this month. I don’t know how it’ll go for her. She might get pregnant right away and spend her Costa Rica trip eating crackers and resting in the cabin instead of hiking. She might not get pregnant for two years, and the trips will be a fun memory before they start their family. There’s no one right answer that fits everyone. Right now, my son is trying to climb onto the counter to get to the cookie jar, so I’ve got to go.
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