Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? An honest parent’s perspective
It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I’m leaning against my kitchen counter picking Cheerios out of the tread of my slippers. My 18-month-old, Lila, just dumped the dog’s water bowl all over the floor mat, and my phone pinged three minutes ago with a text from my college friend Mia: “Should I wait to get pregnant until after our two trips this year? Everyone keeps saying we’re wasting time, but I just want one more big adventure before all the baby stuff starts. What would you do?”
I scroll through my camera roll while I mop up the water, and land on a photo from 2019, taken on a beach in Costa Rica. My husband, Jake, has a black eye from running into a palm tree the day before, I’m sunburnt across the nose, and there’s no one else in the frame but us. That was the first of the two vacations we waited to have before we started trying for a baby, and people asked me the same question back then that Mia’s asking now.
Jake and I got married when I was 27, and we both came out of the wedding with a tiny bit of leftover savings and two unused weeks of PTO. Everyone from my mom to our next-door neighbor asked when we’d start trying for kids. We kept saying we wanted to check two trips off our list first: one lazy beach trip we’d been talking about since we started dating, and a 10-day cross-country road trip to see all the national parks we’d only seen in photos. My mom warned me that waiting past 30 would make it harder to get pregnant. My cousin, who had her first kid 6 months after her wedding, said “you can still travel with a baby, it’s just more fun.” That’s true, I think now, but it’s not the same fun.
We spent 18 months putting extra money away every month to afford the trips, turned down a bunch of weekend barbecues and happy hours to save, and finally went on our Costa Rica trip in the spring of 2019. We stayed up until 2 a.m. drinking $2 rum out of plastic bottles on the beach, and slept in until 10 the next morning because no one needed a bottle at 6. We hiked 7 miles up a volcano at 5 a.m., and when I got altitude sickness halfway up, Jake just slung my pack over his shoulder and we kept going, no need to cut the hike short because of nap schedules or snack demands. We ate fried plantains from a street cart for dinner every night, and didn’t worry about if the food was clean enough or if we’d wake anyone up if we laughed too loud.
That fall, we took the road trip. We drove from our home in Ohio all the way to Yellowstone, and changed our route every single day based on what we felt like doing. We drove 12 hours straight one day because we wanted to see the Grand Teton on a clear day, slept in a $60 motel room off the highway with no AC, and ate gas station hot dogs for lunch three days in a row. We stopped at a weird roadside dinosaur park just because we saw a billboard for it, and spent three hours walking around taking dumb photos of each other with fiberglass T-Rexes. There was no car seat to install, no diaper bag to pack, no need to book a hotel with a crib and blackout curtains three months in advance. It was messy, it was tired, it was entirely ours.
We started trying for Lila the next spring, when I turned 30. It took 10 months to get pregnant, and I had a couple of early scares that made me wonder if my mom had been right about waiting. But even then, I didn’t regret the trips. Once Lila was born, we haven’t had a trip that’s just the two of us since. Our last big trip was a Christmas visit to Jake’s parents in Florida, and we spent the entire plane ride dealing with an ear infection that made Lila scream for two hours, and half the vacation chasing her around the in-law’s pool while she tried to drink the pool water. It’s fun, in its own way, but it’s not the same as that unplanned, no-rules time we had before.
When people ask me if they should wait, I don’t give them a vague “follow your heart” answer. I tell them three concrete things to think through first. First, write down what kind of trips you actually want to take. If you want to sit on a beach at a resort and read books, you can do that with a toddler, as long as you bring extra help to watch them for a few hours a day. If you want to hike 10 miles a day, backpack through Europe, or drive across the country with no fixed itinerary, that’s nearly impossible to do with a kid under 5, and even harder when they’re older and have school schedules to work around. Take those trips now, if that’s what you want.
Second, get a quick fertility check with your OB-GYN if you’re thinking about waiting more than a year. If you’re under 30 and have no history of irregular periods or other issues, the odds are on your side, but it’s worth 15 minutes of a doctor’s time to rule out any red flags before you decide. If you’re over 35, waiting two years for two vacations might not be worth the increased risk, so you’ll have to weigh what matters more to you.
Third, count your actual time and money right now. If you both have extra PTO saved up, and you can afford the trips without going into debt, take them. Once you have a baby, your vacation time will be split between kid-related visits and family trips, and extra money will go to diapers, daycare, and doctor’s co-pays before it goes to spontaneous adventures. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just how it goes.
I texted all that back to Mia yesterday. She wrote back an hour later saying she’d already called her doctor to book that checkup, and they’re keeping the trips, then going to start trying after. I’m sitting here now, watching Lila chase the dog around the living room, Cheerios still crumbs on the floor, and I don’t think she’ll regret it. There’s no perfect timeline for having a baby. Some people don’t mind shifting their plans early, and some people just want a little more time with just their partner first. We still haven’t done that big backpacking trip to Portugal we were talking about before Lila, and maybe we won’t do it for another 10 years. That’s okay. We have the photos, we have the memories of the two trips we did take, and we have this messy, loud, Cheerio-covered life now too. There’s no wrong answer, as long as you’re choosing for you, not for everyone else who has an opinion.
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