Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? Real Talk From One Parent
Last month, I was folding clean beach towels on my back porch, a half-eaten jar of saltwater taffy from our recent Gulf Coast trip sweating on the patio table beside me, when my phone buzzed. It was a text from my sister-in-law Lila, who’s 29 and has been talking about starting a family with her husband Jake for a year. “Random question that’s been keeping me up,” it read. “We booked that two-week Portugal trip in six months, then the ski trip to visit Jake’s family for Christmas after that. Everyone’s telling me different things. Should I wait to get pregnant after these vacations?”
I remembered exactly where I was five years ago, the same question bouncing around my head. My husband Matt and I had been talking about trying for a year, but we’d had these two trips planned since we got engaged three years earlier: a two-week trip to Japan we’d saved for by cutting out takeout every Friday, then a 10-day road trip around the Rockies that we’d promised each other we’d take before we had kids. Every aunt at every family cookout told us we were doing the right thing: “You’ll never get to travel like that again once you have a baby. Get it out of your system now.” My cousin, who’d struggled with fertility for three years, pulled me aside and said she regretted waiting two years for her “final” trips, and I should just start trying now.
We ended up waiting. We went to Japan, stayed in a tiny ryokan with no television, ate sushi at 10pm after wandering around Shinjuku for hours, hiked up a mountain outside Kyoto without stopping once for snack breaks or potty breaks. We camped in Rocky Mountain National Park that fall, woke up at 5am to watch the sun hit the peaks, fell asleep in our tent to the sound of elk bugling, no baby monitor to jolt us awake at 2am. We started trying two weeks after we got home.
It worked the third month, I had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, so I didn’t end up with the fertility struggles my cousin faced. But I’ve thought a lot about the decision since then, especially when other people ask me the same question Lila asked. It’s not the black and white answer social media makes it out to be, either “put yourself first always” or “don’t delay your family for travel.”
When Lila came over last week to talk it out, we split the last of the vanilla taffy and I told her the concrete things I wish someone had shared with me back then, instead of all the vague opinions. First, go book a 15-minute pre-conception checkup with your OB before you decide. That’s something anyone can do, most insurance covers it fully, and it gives you actual facts instead of random family opinions. For Lila, that meant finding out that at 29, with no history of irregular periods or fertility issues in her family, waiting a year for two trips is very low risk. For someone 37, or someone with PCOS or endometriosis, that answer might be totally different, and it’s better to know that going in than to guess.
Second, write down your hard deadline before you delay. I’ve seen so many people put off trying for two trips, then add a third, then a fourth, because they keep thinking “one more adventure before baby.” If you decide to wait, write it down: “We start trying no later than one month after we get back from the ski trip.” That keeps you from drifting into a longer delay than you ever intended, without checking in on your timeline again.
Third, ask yourself what you actually want from these trips, not what other people say you should want. I wanted that Japan trip where we could wander for eight hours a day, change our plans last minute, stay out late drinking sake with people we met at a bar. I got exactly that, and I don’t regret a penny we saved or a month we waited for it. A friend of mine was in the same spot a couple of years ago, decided to go ahead and start trying, got pregnant two months before her planned trip to Costa Rica, went anyway, spent the week lounging on the beach and eating guacamole, and had just as good a time as she would have before baby. It’s okay if your idea of a good vacation changes when you’re pregnant, that doesn’t mean it’s ruined.
I also told her that I was wrong about the “never travel again after baby” myth. We take our 4-year-old on trips every year. Last year we went to Florida, we spent half the day building sandcastles, and after she went to bed in the rental house, Matt and I sat on the porch drinking beer and watching the sunset, just like we used to on our trips before kids. It’s different, it’s not the same unstructured, sleep-when-you-want, go-where-you-please kind of trip, but it’s not bad. It’s just different.
Lila left that afternoon saying she’s going to keep the trips, stick to her deadline of starting trying after Christmas, and if she gets pregnant accidentally before then? She’ll turn Portugal into a babymoon and book a different trip in a few years. I still have mixed feelings about my own decision some days. Some mornings when I’m hauling a car seat and a cooler of goldfish crackers and a foldable potty to the car, I think we should’ve started a little earlier. Other days I flip through my Japan photo album and see that blurry picture of Matt and I covered in matcha ice cream, and I’m glad we had that time just us. There’s no perfect answer, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be the right one for you.
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