Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Waiting
It’s 9:17 PM on a Tuesday, my kitchen table is piled high with Costco detergent-scented laundry, our golden retriever puppy is gnawing on a holey sock under the chair, and my phone just buzzed with a text from my younger sister that stops me mid-fold. “I have two big trips booked this year: Napa in October and our annual ski trip in December. My boyfriend and I want to start trying for a baby next year. Should I wait to get pregnant until after the vacations? What did you do?”
I remember being where she is, seven years ago. My husband and I had decided we wanted to start a family, but we already had two non-refundable trips booked that we’d spent three years saving for: a 10-day backcountry hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies, and a destination wedding in Costa Rica for his college roommate. All the parenting message boards I scrolled back then had two extreme takes: either “never put off having a kid for travel, you’ll always have other vacations” or “travel before kids is the only real travel you’ll get, wait as long as you can”. I was 28, no known fertility issues, my mom had four uncomplicated pregnancies before 30, so we decided to hold off on trying until after both trips were done.
Halfway through the Rockies trip, I stepped off a gnarled tree root on the trail and twisted my ankle bad enough that I could barely put weight on it. We hobbled three miles back to the car, stopped at a small town clinic, got a strong anti-inflammatory painkiller and an elastic wrap, and spent the next two days driving the scenic park roads eating gas station bean and cheese burritos instead of hiking. If I’d been pregnant, I would have spent the whole three miles panicking that I’d hurt the baby, couldn’t have taken the pain meds that let me sleep that night, and we would have cut the whole trip short in a panic. That wasn’t a risk I wanted to take for a trip we’d worked so hard for.
Then Costa Rica: I got a stomach bug the day after the wedding, spent 14 hours curled up on a bathroom floor barely able to keep water down. We were two hours from the nearest major hospital, and again, if I’d been pregnant, that would have been an emergency trip, days of stress about the baby, instead of just a miserable 24 hours that we laughed off a week later. We got back home, started trying, got pregnant on the third cycle, had our son, that was that.
Our son is three now, and we took our first big post-baby trip last summer to the Smoky Mountains. It was fun, don’t get me wrong. But we hiked one mile round-trip to a waterfall with a playground at the end, ate chicken nuggets for three out of five dinners, and the entire day was planned around his 1 PM naptime. We didn’t stay up until 2 AM sitting on a beach talking about what we’d name our kid the way we did in Costa Rica. That kind of unstructured, just-us travel doesn’t happen much when you have a toddler at home, not for the first few years anyway.
When people ask me this question now, I don’t give them a yes or no. I tell them to work through three concrete questions instead of listening to random internet hot takes, because that’s what I wish someone had told me back then.
First, check your health timeline. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had previous issues with fertility, endometriosis, or miscarriages, don’t wait for a couple of vacations. A few months can make a big difference for some people, and that’s not a risk worth taking for a trip. If you’re young, healthy, and have no red flags in your family history, a 3 to 6 month wait isn’t going to hurt anything.
Second, be honest about what kind of trips these are. If they’re two weekend getaways to visit your grandparents two hours away, that’s not a reason to delay. If they’re international trips that you saved years for, involve high activity, or are in remote areas with limited medical care, that’s a different story. It’s okay to want to enjoy those trips without constant stress.
Third, be honest about your own personality. If you’re the kind of person who will Google every little ache and pain at 2 AM, and spend the whole trip worrying that the bumpy plane ride or the bite of brie you ate accidentally hurt the baby, just wait. I’m that person. There’s no way I would have enjoyed a single minute of those trips if I’d been pregnant. If you’re laid back, can roll with a modified itinerary, and don’t spiral over what-ifs, getting pregnant before the trips will be totally fine. My best friend got pregnant two weeks before her Mediterranean cruise, she just skipped the wine tastings and took more naps on the deck, and had the best time of her life.
I texted all that to my sister an hour ago, and she just wrote back “Still on the fence. But leaning toward waiting.” That makes sense for her. She’s 29, healthy, the trips are already paid for, and she knows she’ll spend the whole wine trip worrying about every sip of wine she had before she knew she was pregnant. I don’t tell her it’s the right choice or the wrong one. I know people who got pregnant before their trips and have zero regrets, and people who waited and are glad they did. There’s no perfect formula here.
The puppy just stole my favorite hoodie off the chair, the baseball game just went to extra innings, and I still have a pile of socks to fold. Right now, this is my life, and I don’t regret the choice I made to wait for those two trips. But I also don’t regret that it’s over, that we get to have this messy, sock-stealing, naptime-driven life now too. Whatever she decides, it’ll work out for her, one way or the other.
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