Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Mom’s Honest Perspective
The salt rim on my margarita was melting into the wooden patio table when my phone pinged. It was 2019, I was in Cabo San Lucas, three months after we’d gotten back from our Scotland road trip, and my sister-in-law’s text read: Me and Jake already booked our fall trip to Vermont and a spring cruise next year. Everyone says we shouldn’t wait to try for a baby, but should we hold off till after the vacations? I leaned back in my chair, let the ocean breeze cool my sun-warmed arms, and thought about the two years we’d waited to start trying after our wedding, the three vacations we’d squeezed in that no one would let me stop feeling a little guilty for. I typed back: Let me tell you what no one told me.
When we got engaged, we’d booked those two trips more than a year out, paid them off slowly with extra side hustle money. I was 28, had no known fertility issues, but the thought of dragging a first-trimester nausea spell around castles in the rain, or skipping the ziplining I’d been excited about for years because of pregnancy restrictions, made my chest tight. My mom brought up fertility statistics over Thanksgiving that year: “By the time you wait, you’ll be 30, it’s harder then.” A coworker said I was just putting off parenthood because I was scared of growing up. Even my obgyn, while she said it was totally my choice, reminded me that good things don’t always wait when I told her our plan.
We went anyway. We hiked 8 miles up a glen in Scotland to see a ruined abbey, got lost on a back road and ate warm meat pies from a gas station, slept in till 9 every single day. In Costa Rica, we ate street empanadas at 11 at night, danced to a local band on the beach, and didn’t think once about wake-up times or pediatrician appointments. That fall, after we got back, we stopped preventing pregnancy. It took 10 months to work. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lie awake some nights wondering if we’d made a mistake, if waiting had cost us. But my doctor told me 1 in 5 healthy couples under 30 take 6 to 12 months to conceive, and that it had nothing to do with our timeline. When our daughter was born, I already had a stack of photos and memories that were just mine and my husband’s, no diaper changes or feedings tangled up in them.
That’s the part most people leave out when they’re answering this question, right? Everyone is on one extreme or the other: either you’re selfish for wanting vacations before kids, or you’re a bad parent if you have kids before you check every trip off your bucket list. But the actual answer is way messier, and it boils down to a few concrete things no one talks about.
First, if your trips are already paid for, and you have specific activities planned that you can’t do pregnant or with a newborn, waiting is a logistically smart choice, not a selfish one. You don’t have to defend it to anyone. If you’ve got a $3,000 alpine climbing trip booked that you can’t get a refund for, it’s okay to wait a year. And the line I used for nosy comments was just “We’re going at our own pace” — you don’t have to get into details, you don’t have to justify, just say that and change the subject to Thanksgiving plans. That’s way easier than arguing.
Second, check your actual fertility context before you decide. If you’re over 35, or you’ve been told you have PCOS, endometriosis, or other issues that can make getting pregnant harder, waiting two years for vacations isn’t worth the risk. You can adjust your plans instead: go on smaller trips before the baby comes, or plan that big trip for when they’re a little older instead of waiting to start trying. That’s a way better middle ground than guessing based on what your cousin or your neighbor did.
Third, stop comparing what you want to what other people say about vacation with kids. It’s true you can have fun with kids on vacation. I’ve had a lot of fun taking my daughter to the beach this summer. But it’s not the same as a vacation where you don’t have to be on 24/7. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different thing. If you want just one or two trips where you can sleep in, hike as far as you want, eat whatever you want without worrying about listeria or kid-friendly menus, that’s a totally reasonable want.
My sister-in-law ended up waiting. She went to Vermont, saw the leaves change, drank all the cider she wanted, went on her cruise and sat by the pool reading all day. She got pregnant two months after, and now has a one-year-old who’s already been on three more family trips. Last month, I was folding laundry while my daughter napped, and I found my old trail journal from Scotland, with notes about the pub we found and the rainbow we saw over the loch.
Some days, when I’m up at 3am wiping up throw up from a stomach bug, I wonder what it would have been like to have her a couple years younger. But I don’t regret the time we took. There’s no perfect timeline for this. Some people can’t wait, some people don’t want to wait, that’s all okay. The only wrong answer is the one that you didn’t choose, that you picked just to please everyone else asking when you’d have kids. Right now, my daughter just woke up from her nap, and she’s standing here holding a crayon wanting me to draw a dog. I’m gonna go do that. The answer to the question is still the one I texted my sister-in-law that day in Cabo: if it feels right for you, it’s right.
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