Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From My Own Choice
The chipped edge of my morning coffee mug digs into my palm as I scroll through last month’s beach vacation photos, when my best friend Lila’s text pops up: “Okay, be 100% honest with me. Should we wait to get pregnant after we do our Europe trip next spring and the fall cabin getaway we already booked? All our parents say we need to enjoy our freedom first, but I’m 34 and my OB says waiting another 18 months isn’t ideal.” Goldfish crumbs my 4-year-old left on the table stick to my forearm as I lean in to re-read. I remember sitting right at this same table five years ago, scrolling through the same question in fertility forums, the same line repeated over and over: “Get all your traveling out now, because you’ll never get to do it again once you have a baby.”
Back then, my husband and I had a 10-day trip to Japan booked nine months out. We’d talked about starting a family for a year, saved up for both the trip and the baby, and couldn’t decide what to do. Every cousin, every coworker, every random mom at the grocery store weighed in when we mentioned the dilemma: Wait. You’ll thank us later. One night, we were camping at the state park two hours from our house, eating overcooked s’mores over the fire, and we argued about it until the fire burned down to embers. I said I didn’t want to wait another year if it meant we’d have a harder time getting pregnant down the line. He said he didn’t want me to spend our dream trip throwing up in train bathrooms, missing out on all the sushi and ramen we’d been planning to eat for years. We finally agreed to just start trying, and see what happened. If I got pregnant, we’d adjust the trip. If I didn’t, we’d have a great child-free adventure.
I got pregnant six weeks before we left. First-trimester all-day sickness hit hard, and I did throw up on the bullet train between Kyoto and Tokyo. I couldn’t eat the raw tuna I’d been craving for a year, and we napped for two hours every afternoon instead of hitting three temples a day like our original itinerary. We cut out three cities and just stayed in Kyoto and Tokyo, and it was still the best trip we’ve ever taken. We came home, had our daughter seven months later, and we’ve taken four trips as a family since then—nothing as fancy as Japan, but trips that felt just as good in their own way.
I have two friends who went the other way, and both have very different takes. Sarah, who’s a year older than me, waited 18 months to do two big trips through South America. She ended up needing IVF to get pregnant, and says she wishes she’d started trying first, even if she had to reschedule the trips. Mia, who’s my age, waited a year to do a cross-country road trip and a European river cruise, got pregnant two months after she got back, and says she’s so glad she got those trips in before the toddler years that she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
When I text Lila back, I don’t give her a yes or no. I tell her the three concrete things we worked through that you won’t see shouted in those forum threads. First, go talk to your OB this week, before you decide. Ask them straight up what your personal timeline looks like, based on your age, your health, any issues you’ve already had. That’s not something your mom or your coworker can tell you. If you’re 28 with no known fertility issues, waiting 12 or 18 months for two vacations is almost always fine. If you’re 36 with PCOS, that’s a whole different calculation, and it’s worth getting actual medical information before you weigh the trips against that.
Second, check your bookings. Most airlines and hotels let you change or cancel trips for a small fee these days, and a lot of travel insurance covers pregnancy-related cancellations even if you conceive after you book. You don’t have to choose between losing the money you already spent and delaying trying to get pregnant. When I was pregnant, we changed our Japan itinerary for a $100 change fee, and it worked out fine. If your trips are non-refundable and you can’t change them, that’s a good reason to wait until after you go, if that fits your fertility timeline.
Third, ask yourself if you’re buying into the myth that you’ll never travel again once you have a baby. I hear this all the time, and it’s just not true. It changes, sure. You don’t spend 12 hours wandering museums or backpacking up mountains the way you used to. You spend more time at playgrounds and grocery stores buying snacks, and you go to bed earlier. But it’s still fun. It’s just different. I was talking to another mom last week who said the best trip she’s ever had was a week at a lake cabin with her two young kids, and that beats any child-free trip she took before she had them.
I finish texting Lila, and my daughter comes running in from the backyard, her shoes covered in grass, and climbs up on my lap to look at the beach photos on my phone. She points to her own face in one of the pictures and yells “That’s me! That’s my sandcastle!” I look back at Lila’s last text, where she says she’s going to book that OB appointment first thing tomorrow. There’s no perfect answer here, and whatever she chooses, there will be things she gains and things she gives up. That’s just how it goes. No one gets to check everything off their list before the next chapter starts, and that’s okay.
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