Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? What one parent learned
Sticky overripe mango juice drips down my forearm onto the concrete balcony rail, and my phone buzzes once in the pocket of my faded cutoffs. It’s my older sister, a mom of two who’s been nagging me about my baby timeline since our wedding reception: “Aren’t you done with vacations? When are you guys actually starting to try?” I wiped the juice on my shorts and stared out at the green hills rolling down to the ocean, and thought about the question I’d been turning over for two years: was waiting worth it?
Two years earlier, my partner and I sat at that same beat-up kitchen table we still have in our apartment, the one with three water rings and a scratch from when we moved our couch last year. We split our limited savings into two accounts back then: one for a baby, and one for two trips we’d been planning since we were 22, working barista shifts and sharing a 300-square-foot studio. We could combine the funds, cancel the trips, start trying that month. Or we could go, check the trips off, wait two years to get settled, and start trying when we had a few more things figured out. I was 29, so everyone had an opinion. My mom sent me articles about fertility declining after 30. My best friend, who had her first baby at 26, told me I’d never get this kind of alone time again once we had a kid. No one would give me a straight answer about what to do.
We went. First the two-week road trip around Iceland. We got lost on an unpaved backroad looking for a hidden hot spring, the rental car’s front bumper scraped against a rock, and the only cabin within 30 miles was locked because the owner forgot we were coming. We slept in the car, ate frozen pepperoni pizza out of the cooler, and stayed up until 1 a.m. watching the northern lights paint green across the sky through the dirty windshield. We argued for 10 minutes about who had to sleep next to the smelly cooler, then made up and shared a bag of gummy bears. Six months later, we spent a week in the Algarve, Portugal, laying on red sand beaches and reading terrible paperback thrillers we bought from a street vendor. We didn’t check work emails once. That Costa Rica trip I was on when my sister texted was just a bonus long weekend we took after my partner got a promotion, the last little trip before we started trying.
When we got home, I had a few weeks of panic. What if we’d wasted our best fertile years just laying on beaches? What if we couldn’t get pregnant when we finally started? I talked to my OB at a pre-conception appointment I’d booked before we left for the first trip, and she asked me a question that stuck with me: what were you sorting out while you traveled? That’s when I realized the vacations weren’t the whole reason we waited. We were waiting for my student loans to be paid off. We were waiting for my partner’s new job to kick in, so we’d have better health insurance that covered maternity care and fertility visits. We were waiting to save up enough for a down payment on a bigger apartment, so we wouldn’t be cramming a crib into our tiny old studio. The trips were just the thing we did while we checked all those boxes, instead of sitting at home stressing about when we’d get pregnant.
That’s the first thing I tell friends who ask me this question now: don’t just wait for the sake of checking vacations off a bucket list. If you’ve got all your basics covered—stable insurance, a place to live, enough savings to cover unexpected baby costs—and you’re ready to start trying, don’t delay just because some influencer said you need to do a “babymoon” before baby. But if you’re waiting to sort those basics out anyway, and you can fit a couple of vacations into that gap, there’s no shame in that. I also tell them to go talk to your own doctor before you decide. I got my specific fertility numbers, checked for any pre-existing conditions that would make waiting risky, and knew that for me, waiting two years was low risk. That’s a concrete step anyone can take, instead of panicking about general statistics you see online.
We got pregnant on our third try, after two years of waiting, though we did lose one early pregnancy six months in, so it wasn’t all smooth. Our daughter is 10 months old now, and she chews on the sea shell we brought back from that Algarve trip every day. Last weekend, we tried to take our first family camping trip, and she pooped through three onesies, a raccoon broke into our cooler and ate all the s’mores supplies, and we packed up and drove home 12 hours early. We laughed about it the whole way, and I thought about that night we slept in the car in Iceland, eating cold pizza and arguing about the cooler. That time together, learning how to solve stupid problems when it’s just the two of you, that’s what I actually got out of those vacations. It’s not the pretty Instagram photos, it’s the practice working as a team that we use now when we’re up at 2 a.m. with a teething baby and we’re both exhausted.
I still have bad days where I wonder if we should have started earlier. I don’t think anyone ever looks at their timeline and thinks it’s 100% perfect. There’s no way to know what would have happened if we’d rushed and started trying three years ago. But I also don’t regret the time we took. No one can tell you what the right choice is for you, but if you’re sitting where I was, asking yourself if waiting for a couple of vacations is okay, it can be. It just depends on why you’re waiting, and what you do with that time.
We’re already planning our next big trip, this time with the baby in tow. It’ll be messier, it’ll be more expensive, and we definitely won’t spend three days straight laying on the beach reading. That’s fine. We already got our time alone, and now we get this. There’s no perfect timeline, just the one that fits what you need right now.
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