Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Two Different Choices
I’m brushing crumbs of saltwater taffy off my back porch, folding the faded striped beach towels we dragged home from our long weekend at the coast last week, when my phone pings with a screenshot from an old group chat. A 28-year-old cousin-of-a-friend is asking the same question my best friend Lila asked me three years ago: “I have two big vacations booked for the next year and a half. Should I wait to get pregnant until after they’re done? Everyone says I’m being stupid.”
I remember that coffee with Lila three years ago, at the divey spot downtown with the sticky muffin tins and spotty Wi-Fi. She slid her phone across the table, showing me her mom’s text: “You’re 31, your fertility isn’t getting any younger. Why waste time on trips when you could be starting your family?” She and her husband Jake had booked the two trips back in 2021, when all COVID restrictions lifted, saving for them by picking up extra side work, skipping a new car, and eating homemade pasta every Sunday instead of going out. The first was two weeks in Amalfi, where they wanted to eat their way along the coast and stay in a tiny cliffside Airbnb that only booked two years out. The second was a 10-day ski trip to Niseko, something Jake had dreamed of doing since he was a teenager working at a local ski hill.
I told her my story right back. I got pregnant three months after our wedding, right when the first wave of COVID restrictions lifted. We were so excited to start our family, we didn’t even think about waiting. We cancelled the 10-day trip to Iceland we’d booked, put all that money toward the nursery, and dug in. The first four years were a blur of nap schedules, daycare sick days, and working around the clock. We never took a single trip that wasn’t driving four hours to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving. By the time our oldest was 4, I was so burnt out I could barely get through a Tuesday without napping on the couch after dinner. I told Lila I don’t regret my kids, not for a second, but if I could go back, I’d have taken the trips first. I didn’t realize how much of your own identity and leisure time gets put on hold, at least for the first few years.
Lila and Jake ended up going on both trips. Before they left, though, they did one small, concrete thing I hadn’t even thought of: they scheduled a preconception checkup with their OB. They got a basic fertility panel done, checked her hormone levels, and talked through their personal risk of waiting 18 months. The doctor said everything looked great, that waiting that long wasn’t going to make any meaningful difference for their odds of conceiving, so they went. They came back, started trying, got pregnant six months later, and their baby girl was born three months ago. I went to visit them last week, the baby was asleep in her bassinet by the couch, and there’s a huge framed photo above the changing table of Lila and Jake covered in snow, grinning, holding hot drinks at the top of that run in Japan. Lila was holding a half-eaten granola bar, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, and she said when she’s up at 2 a.m. breastfeeding and she feels like she’s going to fall apart, she looks up at that photo and remembers what it felt like to just be them, not just mom and dad. She says that memory makes it easier to show up for the baby now.
The biggest practical thing I’ve taken away from both our choices is this: vacations before kids and vacations after kids are not the same thing. I don’t care how good of a traveler you think you are, the first four or five years after you have a baby, a relaxing two-week trip wandering around a foreign country is just not on the table. We tried a three-day trip to Chicago when my oldest was two, and we spent two of those days cooped up in our hotel room because she refused to nap anywhere but her pack n play and screamed through every restaurant we tried to go to. We left a day early, exhausted, and still haven’t tried that kind of trip again. If the trips you’re planning are the kind of adventure you’ve been dreaming of for years, you will not get that same experience back for at least a decade, if ever.
If you’re worried about fertility, the concrete step I tell everyone to take is to just go get that preconception checkup. Most insurance covers it, it takes one appointment, you can get basic testing done to see where you’re at. If your doctor says you have a higher risk of infertility, you can decide what matters most to you. If everything looks good, you don’t have to give up your trips just because your aunt is nagging you at Thanksgiving. And don’t cancel non-refundable trips just to please other people. If you already booked them and you’re on the fence, you can always start trying before you leave. Most low-risk pregnancies are totally fine to travel in the first or second trimester, so if you get pregnant before the trip, you can still go, you just have to adjust your plans a little.
Lila still has days where she panics that she waited, that what if she has trouble getting pregnant a second time down the line? It’s not a perfect decision, there’s no way to know how things will turn out. I still have days where I wish I’d had those two big trips before kids, that I’d gotten to be just my husband and me for a little longer before we jumped into parenting. There’s no one right answer for everyone. But what I do know is that going into the hardest job you’ll ever do, you get to prioritize filling your cup first, if that’s what you want. You don’t have to feel guilty for wanting a couple of adventures before you start changing diapers and staying up for middle-of-the-night feedings.
Right now, my 10-month-old is crying from her nap, so I need to go get her. We’ll never know how things would have turned out if we’d made the other choice, and that’s okay. For the people asking now, it’s okay to make the choice that feels right for you, not the choice everyone else tells you to make.
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