Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
I’m dumping sand out of a frayed canvas tote onto my back porch steps when Lila leans back in her scuffed plastic lawn chair and asks the question she’s been turning over for three months. “Do you think I’m crazy for wanting to wait six more months to start trying? Me and Jake already did the two big pre-baby vacations we saved for—Japan last fall, Cabo last month—but I still don’t feel ready to hit pause on… this.” She gestures to the stack of sun hats beside her, the waterproof camera we just finished downloading photos from, the crumpled bag of saltwater taffy we’ve been picking at all afternoon.
Her mom keeps telling her she’s right to wait: “You’ll never get to travel like that again, why rush into diapers and middle-of-the-night feedings when you can still sleep in?” Her sister-in-law, who had her first kid at 35 after struggling to conceive, says she’s being reckless: “You already had your fun, why put it off when your eggs are good and you’re young?” Lila’s caught between the two, and I get it. I was in the exact same spot three years ago.
My husband and I had just wrapped up our two planned pre-baby trips: a two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest, and a long weekend in New Orleans for a friend’s 30th birthday. We were 29, ready to be parents someday, and everyone we knew kept asking when we’d get started. But when I sat on a ferry coming back from the San Juan Islands, watching orcas swim past the bow, I couldn’t shake the quiet feeling that I wasn’t done yet. I still wanted more time that didn’t revolve around nap schedules or pediatrician appointments or saving every extra penny for daycare.
I didn’t just pull a number out of thin air, though. I pulled up my notes app and typed out a quick, messy list that I still have saved today. First, I wrote down every trip or travel experience I thought I’d genuinely miss out on for at least the first five years of having a kid. That list ended up being short: an overnight backpacking trip up Mount Rainier, a 10-day food trip around Portugal where we’d eat 12 small meals a day and walk 8 miles a day, and a long weekend camping with my college friends that happens every year and involves staying up until 2am drinking cheap beer around a fire.
Next, I crossed out anything I could do with a small kid, or do cheaper later once my kids are older. The camping weekend? I could go when my kid is 5, that’s fine. The overnight backpacking trip? I didn’t want to wait until I’m 35 to do that, I wanted to do it when my knees still handle 4000 feet of elevation gain without being sore for three days. The food trip? Same thing—hiking 8 miles a day between small family restaurants just isn’t happening with a toddler in a stroller, and I didn’t want to wait a decade to do it.
Then I did one concrete thing I tell every friend who asks me this question: I booked a 15-minute check-in with my OB to talk about fertility. I didn’t just go by what my aunt or a random social media creator said about waiting. I told her my plan, that I wanted to wait 12 months to do those two trips before starting trying, and I asked her what the risk was for me, specifically. I don’t have any pre-existing fertility issues, my family history is clear, I was 29. She told me waiting a year wasn’t going to make any meaningful difference for me, and that if it made me feel more settled going into parenthood, it was a good call. That’s way better than guessing or listening to other people’s horror stories.
We ended up waiting 10 months, did the two trips, checked them off the list, and started trying. I got pregnant on the third try, and I’ve never once looked back and wished I’d started sooner. I have a friend who got pregnant three weeks after her pre-baby honeymoon to Italy, and she’s happy with her kid, but she still mentions that backpacking trip through the Dolomites she never got to take, that little niggling what-if that pops up every now and then. I have another cousin who waited three years after her pre-baby trips to start trying, because everyone told her she should enjoy her freedom more, and she ended up needing IVF to get pregnant, and that regret is way bigger than any regret over a missed trip would have been.
The thing no one tells you is that you don’t have to pick between “start trying the day you get home from your last vacation” and “wait five more years to have kids.” It’s okay to wait six months for one more small trip with your friends. It’s okay to start the next month if you’re ready. The mistake most people make is letting other people’s priorities become their own. If you’re someone who doesn’t care that much about one more trip, and you’re ready to start, then start. If you’ve got one or two small things you want to check off the list that won’t take years, and your doctor says it’s low risk for you, then wait.
I told Lila about the list, about the OB check-in, about how it worked out for me. She wrote the idea down in her phone that afternoon, and last week she texted me a photo from her campsite in the Smoky Mountains. It’s her and Jake, covered in mosquito bites, holding cans of cheap beer, a campfire smoldering in front of them. The caption says “one last trip before we start.” I texted back that it looks perfect, and that whatever happens next is okay.
No one can give you a perfect answer to this question. There’s no right call that works for everyone. Some months you’ll wonder if you waited too long, some months you’ll wonder if you started too soon. That’s just how parenting goes, isn’t it? You do the best you can with the information you have, and you check the boxes that matter to you, not the boxes everyone else thinks you should check. Right now, this is what feels right for Lila, and that’s enough.
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