Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Mom’s Honest, Practical Take
I was folding my 5-year-old’s dinosaur pajamas last spring, a half-empty gas station iced coffee sweating on the coffee table, when my phone blew up with texts from my sister Lila. She’d just landed back home after a 10-day beach trip with her fiancé, they’d been talking about starting a family for a year, and her text read: “Everyone says I need to travel while I still can. We already booked the European river cruise with my mom for next fall and a long weekend in Vermont for leaf-peeping. Should I wait to get pregnant until after both trips? What would you do?”
I laughed, because I’d been in that exact spot six years earlier. My husband and I had booked a week-long surfing trip to Costa Rica that we’d saved for by skipping Friday night takeout for 18 months. Six months after that, we had a spot at a beach house for my cousin’s destination wedding in Maui. I was 32, ready to start trying, but every parenting Instagram and dinner party conversation centered on one rule: get all your fun travel out before you have kids, because once you have a baby, you’ll never relax on vacation again. I lay awake for three nights running, going back and forth. If we waited a year and a half, we’d get the two trips we’d worked so hard for. But if we waited and it took longer than we expected to get pregnant, I’d be 34 before we even started, and I’d spent years hearing about how fertility drops after 30. I couldn’t win either way.
I ended up deciding to start trying right away. I figured if it took a few months, we’d still be fine, and if we got lucky fast, I’d just adjust the trip itinerary. We got pregnant the first try. I spent most of the Costa Rica trip napping in a hammock under a palm tree while my husband surfed, because first-trimester fatigue hit me so hard I could barely walk to the beach without stopping to sit down. I couldn’t drink the local coffee I’d been excited to try, and I got a mild sunburn on my shoulders because I forgot that pregnancy makes your skin extra sensitive. At the Maui wedding, I left the reception an hour early because my feet swelled so bad I couldn’t tie my sandals anymore, and I sipped sparkling water while everyone else drank pineapple margaritas. I went to bed that first night in Costa Rica crying a little, because I thought I’d ruined the trip we’d saved for.
But then, after our son was born, the thing everyone warned about never happened. We didn’t stop traveling. We did a weekend camping trip two hours from home when he was 10 months old, and we just brought a pack ‘n play and a bag of frozen peas for his teething. We did a week at the Outer Banks when he was 2, and we spent most days building sandcastles instead of bar hopping or fancy dinners. Last year, when he was 4, we did that exact European river cruise Lila is going on, and sure, it was messy. He got motion sickness the first day, spilled a whole gelato on a museum’s marble floor, and we had to cut the wine tasting short because he wanted to go play on the playground instead of tasting pinot noir. But it was still a good trip. He still talks about feeding swans along the Seine, and we have a hundred blurry polaroids taped to the fridge from the week.
From that whole experience, the practical stuff I’ve passed on to Lila and other friends isn’t the “just follow your heart” vague advice you see everywhere. It’s three concrete questions to work through, that take 10 minutes to answer, that help you figure out what’s right for you.
First, add up how much money you’d lose if you got pregnant and had to cancel or change your trips. If you’ve already paid thousands for non-refundable deposits, and that money would put a huge strain on your budget later with a new baby, it’s totally okay to wait until after the trips to start trying. If you can get travel insurance that covers pregnancy cancellations, or you can move the booking to a later year for a small fee, you don’t have to hit pause just because the trips are already on the calendar. For Lila, the river cruise was already paid for by her mom, and it’s non-refundable, and it’s something her mom has wanted to do together for 10 years, so that made waiting an easy call for her.
Second, be honest about your own fertility timeline. If you’re 27, no known health issues, and you’ve got all the time in the world, waiting a year for two vacations isn’t going to change anything. If you’re 37, or you’ve already had one miscarriage, or your doctor told you it might take a while to get pregnant, waiting 18 months for two trips might be a risk you don’t want to take. That’s not saying vacations aren’t important, it’s just weighing what matters more to you personally, not what a stranger on the internet says you should do.
Third, if you decide to start trying before the trips, let go of the idea that the trip has to be perfect. I did three small things that made my pregnant trips way easier: I bought travel insurance that explicitly covered pregnancy-related complications, I checked in with my OB a month before we left to make sure the destination was safe for a pregnant person, and I packed twice as many snacks and compression socks as I thought I needed. I also told my husband ahead of time that I might need to skip half the excursions, and that was okay. We didn’t lose the trip, we just changed what the trip was.
Lila just got back from her river cruise last week. She texted me a photo this morning of her leaning against a rail on the boat, holding a glass of French wine, with her mom grinning next to her. She starts trying next month. There’s no way to know how it will go. She might get pregnant right away, or it might take a year, and either way, there will be things she celebrates and things she wishes were different. I don’t regret my choice to start trying early, and I don’t think she’ll regret hers. The thing no one says enough is that there’s no perfect time to get pregnant, and you don’t have to choose between vacations and a family. Trips before kids are fun, but trips after kids are just different, not worse. You can have both, just not always at the same time you planned.
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