Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
Rainy Saturday last month, I sat across from my best friend Lila at our go-to coffee shop, watching her twist a crumpled straw wrapper around her finger while our oat milk lattes sweated onto the wood table. She’d just gotten engaged three weeks prior, and she and her partner already had two big trips booked for the next 12 months: a cherry blossom tour of Japan, and a destination wedding in Portugal. “Everyone keeps asking when we’re going to start trying,” she said, pushing her engagement photo across the table. “My mom keeps hinting about my age, my cousin says we’re being selfish for putting it off for vacations. But I just want us to have a little time just us, before everything changes. Should I wait?”
I remembered immediately when I sat where she was, five years ago. My husband and I had just gotten back from our honeymoon, and we already had an Iceland glacier hike booked for six months later, and a road trip around Nova Scotia paid off for 12 months after that. Every other family dinner ended with someone asking when we’d give my grandma a great-grandbaby. My sister, who’d gotten pregnant three months after her wedding, told me I was just pushing back the inevitable, that I’d be burnt out on trying by the time we got around to it. My OB just shrugged when I asked her and said “it’s your call.”
We ended up waiting 18 months total before we stopped using protection. I still remember that Iceland trip: we hiked 10 miles across a glacier at 2 a.m., because the sun never set that far north, and we stopped at a gas station on the way back for those cheap Icelandic hot dogs everyone raves about, ate them sitting on the hood of our rental car while the sky glowed pale pink. We got lost on the way back to our cabin, and laughed so hard at the wrong turn we took that I could barely breathe. That Nova Scotia trip? We stayed in a one-room cabin with no cell service, ate lobster for dinner three nights in a row, played Scrabble until 1 a.m. and never once set an alarm. There’s no version of that trip with a baby, or even a toddler, that feels anything like that. That time just ours is something I still pull out when we’re having a chaotic week of tantrums, school forms, and forgotten soccer cleats.
But I also have two close friends who took different paths, and that matters too. One got pregnant two months after her wedding, had to cancel her big European trip because of first-trimester morning sickness that left her bedridden, and she still says she doesn’t regret having her son when she did, but she still brings up that trip sometimes, like a quiet what-if. Another waited three years to check off all the big trips on her list, and by the time she started trying, she found out she had low egg reserve, and it took four years of IVF to have her first kid. She says if she’d known, she would have started trying sooner and fit the trips in around it.
So when Lila asked me what I thought, I didn’t give her some vague “follow your heart” line. I gave her the three concrete things I walked through when I was deciding, that anyone can do too.
First, pull out your trip confirmation emails and check the fine print. How much can you transfer or cancel if you get pregnant earlier than you planned? Lila’s Japan deposit was transferable to any date for three years, and the Portugal wedding trip could be changed to a different name if she couldn’t go, or adjusted for a babymoon later. Ours were the same: if we’d gotten pregnant six months early, we could have moved the trips. That takes a lot of the risk out of waiting, because it’s not like you lose thousands of dollars if things don’t go to your timeline.
Second, figure out what “wait” actually means for you. It doesn’t have to be 100% prevention with hormonal birth control that takes months to get out of your system. We used condoms the whole time we were waiting. If we’d gotten pregnant accidentally, we would have just rolled with it, adjusted the trips, and moved forward. That low-stakes waiting means you don’t put your life on hold either way, which takes a lot of the pressure off.
Third, if you’re over 35 or you already know you have any fertility issues, book a 20-minute checkup with your OB before you decide to wait more than six months. A quick blood test and a consult can tell you if waiting is a low-risk choice for you, or if you should start trying sooner and fit smaller trips in later. That’s what my friend who struggled with infertility wishes she’d done, instead of just assuming everything would work out.
Lila left the coffee shop that day saying she was going to stick with her plan. She’s going to keep the trips, do the low-stakes waiting, and see what happens. I don’t know how it will turn out for her. There’s no perfect answer to this question, no one-size-fits-all right choice. For me, waiting was worth every minute. Those two trips gave us memories that we still talk about, that feel like glue for our marriage when things get messy with kids. If I had to do it again, I’d make the same choice. But I also know that if you choose not to wait, that’s the right choice for you too. It’s just a matter of figuring out what matters most to you, and checking the fine print before you decide.
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