Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What One Parent Learned
The blueberry my two-year-old squished into the coffee shop tablecloth is oozing purple when Lila slides her phone across the table. It’s a screenshot of a positive ovulation test, and she twists the silver travel ring on her left finger, the one she bought on her honeymoon in Costa Rica. “We’ve got that two-week Portugal trip booked in three months,” she says. “And the long weekend in Asheville we planned with our friends next month. Should we wait to start trying until after we go?”
I remember sitting in this same booth five years ago, turning the exact same question over in my head. My husband and I had just bought our first house, we were ready to start trying for a baby, but we’d already locked in a ski trip to Colorado that January and a beach trip with my sister to Outer Banks that June. My mom kept calling saying “just start now, vacations can wait,” and my best friend, who had a one-year-old at the time, said “hell no, go. You’ll never get that kind of time back again.” I went back and forth for weeks, scribbling messy pros and cons on a notebook I kept in my purse.
We ended up deciding to wait. On the ski trip, I caught an edge on a black run halfway through the day and twisted my ankle bad enough we couldn’t drive back to our remote rental that night. We got a last-minute room at a lodge at the base of the mountain, ordered a large pepperoni pizza and a six-pack of beer, and watched a terrible 90s action movie until we fell asleep. No one needed a bedtime, no one needed a middle-of-the-night bottle, no one had to be up at 6am for daycare. It was messy and inconvenient and totally ours. A few months later, on the beach trip, my sister and I sat on the balcony of our rental until 1am drinking cheap rosé, talking about all the dumb things we did in our 20s, and I slept in until 9am the next day because my husband got up to walk the dog. If we’d been pregnant already, first-trimester exhaustion would have had me in bed by 9pm, and I never would have stayed up that late talking. That memory still feels like a gift.
A lot of people will tell you waiting is selfish. I’ve seen it in comment sections a hundred times: if you’re that focused on vacations, you’re not ready to be a parent. Or you can still travel with kids, what’s the big deal? Both of those things are sort of true, but they miss the point. Travel with kids isn’t bad. It’s just different. Last month, I took my two kids to the beach, and we built sandcastles and ate ice cream for lunch and it was fun. But we spent an hour digging sand out of my toddler’s diaper after she decided to roll in the dunes, we left the beach by 11am because it was past naptime, and we never ate dinner out after 7pm because both kids are asleep by 7:30. It’s a different kind of fun, and it’s our fun now, but it’s not the same spontaneous, unplanned, just-us fun I had before kids.
When Lila asked me what I thought, I didn’t give her a yes or no answer. I asked her three concrete questions I wish someone had asked me back when I was deciding. First, what does your actual fertility timeline look like? If you’re in your late 30s, or you’ve had issues getting pregnant before, waiting six months for two vacations is a very different call than if you’re 29, healthy, and have no reason to think conceiving will take years. For Lila, that was an easy answer: she’s 29, her doctor says everything looks good, so waiting six more months doesn’t change much for her long-term goal of having a baby. Second, what do these trips give you that you can’t get later? For Lila, the Portugal trip centers around a five-day coastal hike she and her husband have been training for for a year. That’s not something you can do in the first trimester when you’re exhausted all day, and it’s not something you can easily do with a baby on your back or a toddler who needs to stop every five minutes to pick up rocks. It’s okay to want that experience the way you planned it. Third, what’s the actual worst case of waiting? If you push conceiving by six months, will that actually ruin anything, or are you just anxious to check the “have a baby” box because everyone else you know is having kids? For a lot of people, the only downside is other people’s opinions, not an actual downside for you.
I also told her there’s no universal right answer. I have a friend who got pregnant right before her big European trip, she went, ate all the croissants she wanted, walked slower than she planned, and had the best time of her life. She doesn’t regret not waiting at all. For me, waiting was the right call. I don’t look back at those two trips and think I was being selfish. I think I filled up my cup a little before I started pouring everything into being a mom, and that makes the hard days a little easier to get through.
Last week, Lila texted me a photo from Portugal. She and her husband are standing on a cliff at the end of their hike, their cheeks are pink from the wind, they’re holding a bottle of local red wine they bought from a vineyard down the road. She captioned it “worth the wait.” I don’t know what will happen when they get home. Maybe they’ll get pregnant the first month, maybe it’ll take a year, maybe there will be things they don’t expect that no one can plan for. But right now, that photo looks exactly like what they needed.
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