Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Practical Perspective
Last month, I was sitting at a sticky corner table at my neighborhood brunch spot, maple syrup gluing the edge of my pancake plate to the table, when my 28-year-old cousin Lila leaned in and asked the question that’s been bouncing around her group chat for months. She and her boyfriend just got back from a two-week trip through coastal Portugal, and they already have a ski trip to Colorado booked for January. “Everyone says I should stop messing around and start trying now,” she said, twisting the stem of her half-empty mimosa. “But what if we just want to be us, no diapers, no bedtime routines, for a little longer? Is it crazy to wait to get pregnant just for a couple vacations?”
I told her I’ve been on both sides of this question. When my husband and I got married nine years ago, we’d planned a 10-day trip to Thailand six months after the wedding. Almost every older relative we talked to told us we shouldn’t wait, that we were young, we should get started right away, that delaying even a few months was unnecessary. We caved, stopped using birth control three months early, and I got pregnant that first cycle. We canceled the trip, booked a long weekend at a lake cabin a three-hour drive from home, and called it good. I was over the moon to be pregnant, but I still had that crumpled Thailand itinerary, with our scribbled note about trying mango sticky rice from the night market, taped to my fridge for three years. Every time I opened it to grab a magnet, I’d feel that small, sharp twinge of what we’d skipped.
When our son turned three, we started talking about having a second kid. This time, we had two trips we’d been putting off for years: a two-week road trip up the Pacific Coast, where we camped at state parks and stayed at weird old motels that didn’t charge extra for our rambunctious three-year-old, and a long couples’ weekend in Vermont that fall, where we stayed at a B&B with a private hot tub and slept in until 9am both days. We did both trips, then started trying. I got pregnant three months later, and that was our daughter.
The difference between the two first years surprised me. With my son, I spent a lot of those early nights resenting the lack of freedom. We’d never gotten that unstructured time just the two of us after the wedding, never got to laze around all day on a Saturday without a kid needing something, never got to take a trip where we changed plans last minute just because we felt like it. When we were up at 2am with a fussy baby, that resentment would bubble over into small fights over who forgot to buy more diapers or who had to get up next. With my daughter, that never really happened. We’d already had that time. We’d already checked those trips off our list, made those memories just us, so the hard days with a newborn just felt like a phase, not a thing we’d been forced into before we were ready.
Now, I’m not saying this is the right choice for everyone. That’s the thing no one talks about when people ask this question: it all depends on your own body and your own timeline. The first concrete thing I told Lila to do was talk to her OB about her specific fertility, not just go by what her aunt says on Facebook. If you’re 36 and have a history of PCOS or endometriosis, waiting 18 months for two vacations might not align with what your doctor recommends for you. But if you’re 28 or 30 with no known fertility issues, waiting a year to take the trips you’ve already saved and planned for isn’t reckless. It’s just prioritizing something that matters to you.
The second concrete step I suggested she try is mapping out the timeline to see if a middle ground works better. You don’t have to choose between starting trying tomorrow or canceling all pregnancy plans for two years. If you’ve already got a vacation paid for six months from now, you can start trying now, and if you get pregnant, most doctors clear women for travel up to 28 weeks for most destinations. You don’t have to cancel the trip, you just pack more snacks and stop for bathroom breaks more often. If you’re okay with potentially being pregnant on the trip, you don’t have to wait to start trying at all.
I also told her that vacations don’t have to be big international trips to count. If you can’t afford two big trips right now, three long weekend getaways within a two-hour drive of your house, where you don’t check work email and just hang out together, works just as well. The point isn’t to check off a bucket list before kids, it’s to build up a stock of shared, low-stress memories that you can lean on when those first hard newborn months hit.
Lila left brunch that day saying she was still going to stick with her plan: go on the ski trip in January, then start trying next spring. She still gets comments from family members about her “ticking clock” at every holiday dinner, and she still has days where she worries she’s making the wrong choice. I don’t tell her she’s definitely doing the right thing, because no one can promise that. What I do tell her is that it’s okay to prioritize what matters to you, even if it’s just a couple of trips where you get to be just you, before you become a mom. Some regrets weigh more than a short wait, and this is one choice only you get to make.
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