Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? What our experience taught us
I’m crumpling a negative pregnancy test in an airplane bathroom trash, the one I peed on 20 minutes before we boarded our flight home from Portugal, our second “pre-baby” vacation in 12 months. Outside the tiny stall, my husband is leaning against the snack cart, joking with the flight attendant about our extra carry-on stuffed full of cheap port wine we bought at a vineyard outside Porto.
We got married at 28, and the question started before the cake was cut at the reception. When are you having kids? We had a ready answer: after we take the two trips we’ve been planning since we were broke college students. One to the Algarve to hike the coastal trails, one to Japan to eat at the tiny ramen shops we saw on a late-night food documentary. Everyone nodded, some people said we were smart to get travel out of our system, others whispered that fertility doesn’t wait, and we shouldn’t put it off too long.
Three months after the wedding, we sat at a sticky diner booth with my cousin, who’d had her first baby six months after her own wedding. Her baby spit up on her linen sweater mid-conversation, and she laughed it off and said “You can travel with kids, you know. It’s not that bad.” But I looked at the spit-up stain, at the diaper bag spilling onto the floor, and I still wanted those two trips. We’d saved for them for five years, worked extra shifts to put away the cash, and I didn’t want to do them half-asleep, stressed about nap schedules or toddler meltdowns over dropped ice cream. So we stuck with the plan.
First trip was Costa Rica, a week of zip lining through rainforests and drinking cold beer on the beach after dark. We stayed up until 1 a.m. every night talking about what kids would be like, what we’d do differently than our own parents. It was quiet, it was ours, and I left feeling glad we’d waited. Ten months later, we did Portugal. That’s where the negative test came in. We’d decided after this trip, we’d start trying. I was so sure it would happen right away. I’d read all the blogs, I’d heard all the stories of people getting pregnant the first month. So that crumpled test hit me harder than I expected.
A year went by, and still no positive test. I started leaving baby showers early, crying in the parking lot on the drive home, wondering if we’d made a terrible mistake. If that two-year wait for two vacations had cost us our chance at a kid. My mom dropped the same comment every holiday dinner: Your eggs aren’t getting any younger, you know. I started avoiding group dinners with friends who had new babies, and I resented every photo we had from Portugal, like that fun trip had traded away our future.
I finally went to my OB for a full workup, and she told me everything looked fine. Most people take a year to get pregnant, even people in their late 20s, she said. Waiting two years for vacations didn’t change anything for me, that’s what she told me. It just felt like it because I was stressed. We ended up taking a last-minute long weekend trip to the mountains, just the two of us, because we realized we were still allowed to have fun while we were trying. I got pregnant that trip. My daughter is three now.
Yesterday I was digging through a junk drawer for tape to wrap a birthday present, and I found the folded paper itinerary I’d printed for Portugal. I sat on the floor and looked at it, and thought about all the questions I see other people asking in parenting groups online: Should I wait to get pregnant to take a couple of vacations? Is it selfish? Will I regret it?
What I tell people now, based on what we went through, is there’s no right answer, but there are a couple of small, concrete things you can do if you’re leaning toward waiting. First, schedule a 15-minute pre-conception checkup with your doctor before you start your waiting period. Ask them what your personal risk is for waiting 1-2 years, based on your age and any health conditions you have. When we decided to wait, I put all fertility-related stuff out of my mind and didn’t go until a year after we started trying, which just added a lot of unnecessary stress I could have avoided. Second, only wait for the trips that actually matter to you. Don’t delay trying just because social media says you need to check off a bunch of pre-baby “bucket list” trips that you don’t even care that much about. We waited for the two trips we’d been planning for half our relationship, and that mattered. I wouldn’t have waited for a random all-inclusive beach trip just to check a box. Third, keep doing small, healthy pre-conception habits even while you wait. Take your prenatal vitamins, keep your annual ob/gyn checkups, don’t just hit pause on everything baby-related until after your trips. That’s what I did wrong, and it was easy to fix.
I still don’t know if we would have gotten pregnant earlier if we hadn’t waited. Probably not, my doctor said it was just chance. Now we’re planning a trip to Japan next year, the trip we put off back when we decided to wait to have kids. We’re going with our three-year-old. We’ll have to leave the ramen shop early if she has a meltdown, we’ll stay in hotels with cribs instead of tiny boutique guesthouses, and it’ll be nothing like the trip we imagined when we were 28. But it’ll be ours, a different kind of good. There’s no deadline for trips, and there’s no one right timeline for having kids. If a couple of vacations first feels right for you, that’s okay. Just don’t forget to take the small steps to keep your own mind at peace while you wait.
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