Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? What to consider before delaying
The crumbs from my 18-month-old’s blueberry muffin were already spreading across the coffee shop tray when Lila leaned in and asked the question she’d been texting me about for a week: Should I wait to get pregnant after our two trips this year? She’d just locked in a 10-day walking trip through rural Portugal this fall, and a ski trip to Jackson Hole next spring with her husband. Her OB had asked her pregnancy plans at her annual checkup last month, and since then she’d toggled between excitement for the trips and panic over every viral TikTok warning about waiting too long to start a family.
I recognized that tight, pulled-apart feeling. Five years ago, I was sitting in her exact spot, same coffee shop, same question bouncing around my head. My husband and I had booked a 3-week backpacking trip through Thailand six months after our wedding, and a 2-week road trip around Iceland we’d been saving for since our first date. My mom called every other week to remind me I was 31, and my cousin had spent three years trying to conceive after waiting to travel for her job, so I’d lie awake at night scrolling fertility message boards, wondering if we were being selfish for putting baby plans on hold for a couple of vacations.
We did it anyway. We went to Thailand, got lost on a day hike to a remote waterfall, ate street-side pad thai that would have had me calling my OB within an hour if I’d been pregnant, and slept in a bunk bed hostel where the air conditioning broke two nights in a row. We got caught in a monsoon that soaked our passports and our backpacks, and laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe when we had to hitchhike back to town with a goat farmer who only spoke Thai. Six months later, we drove around Iceland’s ring road, camped in a leaky tent when our camper van booking fell through, stood under Skógafoss in wind so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers, and ate gas station hot dogs for lunch three days in a row without a single worry about listeria or prenatal activity guidelines.
It wasn’t all perfect. I checked my ovulation app every week even when we were traveling, just in case we changed our mind. I left every family Thanksgiving stressed out after a half-dozen relatives asked when we’d “get serious” about kids. When we got back from our second trip and started trying, it took 10 months to get a positive pregnancy test. There were more than a few nights I cried into my husband’s shoulder, convinced I’d messed everything up by waiting for stupid vacations.
Now that I’m on the other side, I don’t tell people yes or no when they ask me this question. I tell them three specific things to work through, that came from our messy experience. First, book a 15-minute check-in with your OB before you decide. Fertility risk isn’t one-size-fits-all. If you’re 38 with a history of PCOS, waiting 18 months for two vacations is a very different call than if you’re 29 with no known fertility issues. Getting personalized information from your own doctor takes a lot of the guesswork and internet-induced panic out of the decision, instead of going by what a stranger on Instagram told you.
Second, if you do decide to wait, don’t hit pause on all pre-pregnancy prep. Start taking prenatals now, cut back on smoking or excessive drinking if that’s something you’re planning to do anyway, and get any pre-conception blood work done before you leave. That way, you’re ready to start trying as soon as you get home, and it doesn’t feel like you wasted months of time. Third, be clear about what the vacations actually mean to you. Are they trips you’ve been planning for years that involve things you can’t or don’t want to do pregnant or with a toddler? For Lila, it’s 10 miles of walking a day through cobblestone villages, no nap schedules, no need to pack 10 pounds of baby gear. That’s a legitimate want, not a selfish one. If it’s just a vague idea that you need a “last big vacation” before baby, and the trip you’re planning is a week at a beach resort, you can absolutely do that with a baby — it’ll just be different, not worse.
Back at the coffee shop, Lila twisted her engagement ring around her finger and stared at the photo of her Portugal itinerary on her phone. My toddler dumped a half cup of water onto my lap, and I wiped it up with a napkin while I waited for her answer. She said she was going to keep the trips, book the OB check-in this week, start prenatals, and try when they get back.
Last month, she sent me a photo of herself covered in powdered sugar, holding a pasteis de nata in a Lisbon square, sun on her face, grinning. I haven’t heard if she’s pregnant yet, and that’s okay. For us, the stress of those 10 months of trying after we got back was worth it. We have a whole album of photos and inside jokes that are just ours, from before we were mom and dad. When we’re bickering about who forgot to buy diapers or who left the LEGOs all over the living room, we can reference the time we shared a tent with a mouse in Iceland and laugh, and remember we were people first, before all the kid chaos.
Some of my closest friends got pregnant right after their wedding, skipped the big trips they planned, and took their 6-month-old to the beach last year and said it was the best vacation they ever had. There’s no universal right answer. You just have to pick the one that fits what you actually want, not what everyone else thinks you should want.
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