Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Delaying
I’m folding a pile of stretchy baby socks at my kitchen table last month when my best friend Mia drops two iced oat lattes on the counter and leans in. Our fridge is covered in faded magnet stickers from hikes and coastal towns, plus a recent photo of my 10-month-old covered in cake at her first birthday. “Be honest,” she says. “We’ve got two big vacations booked for next year – a cabin trip with our siblings, then that beach honeymoon we had to reschedule twice. Everyone keeps telling me I need to start trying now, but should I wait to get pregnant until after we go?”
Three years ago, I was sitting in that exact same spot, asking myself the exact same question. My husband and I had been talking about starting a family for close to a year, and I was 32, ready to get going. But we’d had a cross-country road trip and a trip to Japan to visit my cousin booked for 12 months out, and every person I talked to had the same line: “You’ll never travel like that again once you have kids.” My mom even said she’d regretted never taking a big trip with my dad before she had my brother and me, so that sentiment hung around in the back of my head.
We hemmed and hawed for two weeks, then I made an appointment with my OB just to check in. I got a full hormone workup, talked through my family history, and she told me that for my specific situation, waiting 18 months to start trying carried no extra risk. That was enough for us. We went ahead with our trips, and I got pregnant three months after we got home.
That road trip was everything people said it would be. We slept in a sagging tent, got lost on a backcountry trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, ate cold leftover pizza for breakfast every day, and didn’t set an alarm for 10 days straight. In Japan, we walked 8 miles a day around Kyoto, stayed up until 1 a.m. drinking sake with my cousin, ate random street food that I never would have risked if I’d been pregnant, and didn’t have to schedule anything around nap times or diaper changes. Those aren’t just vacation photos – they’re the last quiet, just-us memories we have before our lives turned completely upside down in the best way.
But it wasn’t all perfect. By the last two weeks of our Japan trip, I was itching to start trying. I got a mild stomach bug in Tokyo, and I spent an hour panicking in a drugstore that it would throw my cycle off and we’d have to wait even longer. Every time another couple announced a pregnancy on my Instagram feed, I felt a little twist of worry that we’d made the wrong choice. And after we got home, I caught myself adding one more “just one more trip” to the list – there was a long weekend to Maine my friend was planning, why not go that before we start? That’s when I remembered the hard stop date we’d set at the beginning, and I stuck to it. We turned down the Maine trip and started trying, just like we’d planned.
Looking back, that hard stop date is the best practical thing I can tell anyone who’s torn. If you decide to wait, pick a date before you book anything, write it down on your calendar, and commit to starting by then no matter what new trip pops up. It’s easy to keep delaying – there will always be another cool place to see, another group trip you don’t want to miss. A hard stop keeps you from putting off the thing you actually want just because one more fun thing came along.
Another thing I tell people is to go ahead and check in with your own doctor first, before you decide. A lot of general advice online says “don’t delay after 35” but that doesn’t mean waiting 6 or 12 months for two trips is automatically risky for you. Getting a quick checkup lets you make the choice based on your body, not a generic social media take.
If you’re still torn, try this: write down two short lists. One is “what I’ll regret if I wait” and the other is “what I’ll regret if I don’t wait”. You don’t need to add every little logistics point, just the big feelings. For me, I knew I’d always wonder what those trips would have been like if I’d gone before we had a baby, and that regret felt bigger than the worry of waiting 18 months. For my cousin, who was 36 and ready to start, she knew she’d regret waiting two years for her big European trip more than she’d regret going later with kids. She went last year with her 4-year-old, came back with a million photos of her kid chasing pigeons in Paris, and said it was just as good, just different.
Mia texted me a week after her visit, saying she and her husband went to their doctor, got checked out, set a hard stop date for right after their beach trip next fall, and decided to wait. I told her that whatever happens, it’ll work out one way or another. Right on cue, I hear my daughter babbling in her crib down the hall, waking up from her nap. The magnets from our pre-baby trips are still on my fridge, and we’re already planning a weekend beach trip for next month, with 10 extra pounds of gear and a cooler full of puffs and puree pouches. It’ll be nothing like the quiet beach trips I took before kids, but it’ll be ours. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer for everyone. But I know it’s okay to wait for the two trips that matter to you, as long as you go in with a plan.
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