Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The salt from last week’s girls’ Cabo trip still crusted in the seams of my carry-on, Lila and I leaned against my back porch rail picking at a jar of salsa when she pushed her phone across the wobbly wooden table. It was a positive ovulation test. “So here’s the thing,” she said, twisting the frayed end of her sun-bleached ponytail, her shoulders still pink from the coast. “We just did this trip, and we’ve got a European river cruise booked for October. Should I wait to get pregnant until after that?”
I’d been there exactly five years prior. My husband and I had just wrapped up a leaf-peeping trip to Asheville, and we had a two-week family Hawaii trip booked for the following March. We were finally ready to start trying for our first, but I kept pushing the date back. Everyone I knew said once you have a kid, you’ll never get a carefree vacation again. I didn’t want to spend our last big pre-baby trip hunched over a hotel toilet with morning sickness, and I didn’t want to leave a tiny newborn to travel after the baby came. So we agreed we’d wait.
Then one night we got lazy with protection, I convinced myself I couldn’t get pregnant that fast anyway, and two weeks later I was staring at a positive test. I cried for an hour, convinced I’d ruined the trip I’d waited years to take. I’d put my own life on hold to check this vacation box, and I’d messed it up before it even happened.
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re asking this question: most of the fear comes from two myths we all repeat to each other. The first is that getting pregnant before your booked trip will automatically ruin it. The second is that if you don’t cram all your fun trips in before you have a baby, you’ll never get another one. I’ve found both to be pretty untrue for most people.
My Hawaii trip wasn’t what I planned. The first three days, I could barely keep water down, so I stayed in the air conditioned hotel while my whole family hiked around Volcanoes National Park. I ordered room service pineapple over and over and binged old Hawaii Five-0 reruns, and honestly? It was kind of nice. Once my morning sickness lifted, I couldn’t do the 10-mile coastal walk we’d mapped out, but we swapped it for a slow drive along the coast, stopping at every roadside fruit stand we saw, and I felt my baby kick for the first time sitting on a black sand beach. It wasn’t the trip I imagined, but it’s a memory I wouldn’t trade.
As for the second myth, that you’ll never travel without kids again? I’ve got two kids under five, and my husband and I have taken three kid-free trips in five years. It’s not two-week European vacations every year, but we plan long weekends to nearby cities, leave the kids with my mom or in-laws, and come back recharged. The concrete hack that makes this work: start small. Six months after your baby is born, if you have a trusted caregiver, book a two-night trip 2 or 3 hours from home. You don’t need to cross an ocean to get the break you need. Waiting a few months for a small break is way different than waiting 18 years for your first kid-free vacation, which is what the myth would have you believe.
So what do you actually do if you’re asking this question? It doesn’t have to be a black and white choice. First, if you’re 35 or older, or you’ve had fertility issues or endometriosis in the past, the first step is to call your OB and ask how long a wait is safe for you. That’s not something to guess at based on what your cousin or Instagram influencer says. That’s one concrete, five-minute step that clears up a lot of stress right away.
If you’re young, healthy, and have no reason to think conceiving will take a long time, you don’t have to hit pause entirely just because you have a trip booked. Spend 10 minutes going through your itinerary and picking one or two low-key backup options for every big activity. That’s it. For Lila’s river cruise, she already swapped the planned 5-mile bike ride along the Danube for a seated wine tasting at a hillside vineyard, and she picked up a pack of travel anti-nausea bands at the drugstore on the way home from my house. If she doesn’t get pregnant before the trip, she can still do the bike ride. If she does, she’s already prepared, no last minute panicking or feeling like she wasted her money.
I also tell people to be honest with themselves about how many of those “we need to get these trips in first” plans are just procrastination. It’s normal to be scared to have a baby, to be scared your life will change forever, and it’s easy to hide that fear behind a list of trips you want to take first. There will always be another trip you want to take before you start trying. There will always be another wedding, another holiday, another big event you don’t want to miss or be pregnant for. Waiting forever to check every box means you might wait longer than you intended to, and that’s the regret I hear more often than regretting a slightly adjusted vacation.
Last Sunday, Lila texted me a photo of a positive pregnancy test. She’s eight weeks along, the cruise is still three months out, and she hasn’t changed any of the bookings yet. She says she’s still a little nervous she’ll spend the whole trip tired and sipping sparkling water instead of wine, but right now she’s more excited about the baby than she is upset about changing plans. I told her I’d watch her dog while they’re gone, and whatever happens, it’ll be a good story to tell the kid when he’s older.
I still have a crumpled photo in my phone from that Hawaii trip: me, 12 weeks pregnant, blue shave ice dripping down my wrist, grinning at the camera. It wasn’t the trip I planned. But it’s mine. And that’s enough.
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