Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Mom’s Real Experience and Guidance
The sun through the coffee shop window turned Lila’s faded Costa Rica sunburn pink as she leaned across the table, blueberry scone crumbs sticking to her phone screen. She flipped to a photo of a plastic pregnancy test, two faint pink lines blurry in the glare, then flipped back to a shot of her zip-lining over a jungle river, grinning with her husband behind her. “We planned this,” she said, twisting her wedding band. “Two vacations after the wedding before we started trying. We checked both boxes. Now I’m sitting here asking if we should do one more. Should I wait to get pregnant after all, or is this just cold feet?”
Five years ago, I sat across from my sister at this same table, asking her the exact same question. My husband and I had done our honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands, we had a bucket list trip to Japan planned 12 months out, and my ob-gyn had asked at my pre-pregnancy checkup if we wanted to push the trip back and start trying immediately. I went back and forth, staying up late scrolling fertility TikTok one night, then scrolling beach vacation photos the next. Everyone I asked gave me a different answer. My mom said I was young, wait as long as I want. My aunt, who’d struggled with infertility, said don’t wait a single day if you want a kid. My coworker said you’ll never travel again once you have kids, so get it all out now.
I ended up going on the Japan trip. We ate ramen at 10pm after walking for six hours around Tokyo, we woke up at 4am to see the sunrise over Mount Fuji, we didn’t think about crib sizes or pediatrician names once the whole trip. When we got home, we started trying, and it took 10 months for me to get pregnant with my oldest. If I had skipped the trip, I would have been wondering “what if” the whole pregnancy. That’s just how my brain works.
But my best friend from college got pregnant on her honeymoon. She and her husband had two big international trips planned, canceled them both, and had their daughter nine months later. Last year, when their daughter turned 10, they went on that European trip they originally planned. She texted me from Paris, sitting at a cafe drinking wine, and said it’s better now than it would have been 10 years ago. We appreciate it more, she said, after all the diaper changes and soccer games and middle school drama. We don’t take this kind of quiet for granted.
What I’ve realized from talking to a dozen different friends who’ve made both choices is that this question isn’t really about vacations. It’s about two quiet worries: that we’ll never get unplanned, just-us time again if we have a baby now, and that waiting will hurt our chances of getting pregnant at all.
First, the fertility part. The concrete, grounded truth is that if you’re under 35 and have no known health or fertility issues, waiting a year or two for a couple more trips doesn’t change your overall odds that much, according to most ob-gyns. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had issues in the past, that’s a different story – and the first step I tell anyone in that spot is to book a 15-minute pre-pregnancy check-in with your doctor. Ask them your personal risk, don’t make the call based on what you see on social media. It’s a quick, low-effort step that takes a lot of the guesswork out of the decision.
Second, the “never get nice trips again” worry. It’s true that travel with kids is nothing like travel before kids. You’re not going to spend eight hours wandering a contemporary art museum, you’re not going to sleep in till 10am after a late night out, you’re going to carry 20 extra pounds of snacks and extra clothes and a portable crib in your suitcase. But that doesn’t mean you never get just-you trips again. You just get them later, when the kids are older.
If unstructured, just-you travel is something that matters a lot to you right now, it’s okay to wait. But you don’t have to wait two years and check off three big international trips to check that box. A friend of mine who wanted one more just-us trip ended up doing three long weekends at a cabin two hours from home, and that was enough for her. She didn’t need a big trip, she just needed three weekends of no alarms and no plans before she started trying. That’s a concrete compromise if one of you is ready now and the other wants more time.
Another small, actionable step I suggest: sit down with your partner and each write down the top two things you want out of any more pre-baby vacations. Don’t write “we need to go to Italy” – write “I want to hike for six hours a day without stopping for snacks and potty breaks” or “I want to stay out late drinking wine and not worry about waking anyone up” or “I want one trip where I don’t have to plan anything around anyone’s schedule but ours.” Once you have that list, you can figure out how to get that experience faster if you want, instead of waiting years for the perfect big trip that checks every box.
Lila went home after our coffee, and she and her husband booked a two-week road trip around the Rocky Mountains for this fall. That’s all they wanted – one more trip where they can hike as long as they want, stop at any brewery they see, no schedules. After that, they’re going to start trying. I don’t know if it’ll happen right away, I don’t know if they’ll end up deciding to do one more trip after that. That’s fine. There’s no perfect answer that fits everyone. Some people don’t wait and are happy, some people wait and don’t regret it. The only wrong answer is the one that doesn’t fit what you and your partner actually want, right now.
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