Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The toast crumbs from my three-year-old’s breakfast are still stuck to the edge of my kitchen table when my phone dings with a text from my college roommate Lila. Attached is a photo of her grinning with a pastel de nata in hand, sun-bleached hair falling over her shoulders. Her text reads: “Just got home from Portugal. We already did Mexico in March. Everyone keeps saying we should wait to get pregnant to get one more big trip out of the way. Should I? Or hit go on trying now?”
I set down my cold coffee and flip through the beat-up photo album I was sorting, the one full of my own pre-kid trips. I remember being exactly where she is, five years ago. My husband and I had just wrapped a two-week Pacific Northwest road trip and a post-wedding beach week in Jamaica, and every dinner party we went to ended with some older relative or friend telling us “travel now, because you’ll never get to do it once you have kids.” So we decided to wait 18 months to start trying, to fit in three more “last hurrah” big trips: Costa Rica, a long New Year’s weekend in New York, a road trip down Route 66.
I remember lying on a black sand beach in Costa Rica, replaying my obgyn’s comment from a checkup a month before. I’d mentioned we were waiting to travel, and she’d leaned back in her chair and said “I don’t discourage it, but I see so many women plan for one more trip, then one more, then conception takes longer than they thought, and they end up stressed they waited. Your fertility is one thing you can’t put on a timeline just to check a box.” I brushed it off at the time, convinced I had all the time in the world.
Eighteen months later, we stopped preventing pregnancy, and it took 12 months for me to conceive. I ended up having my daughter at 35, which wasn’t a crisis, but it added a year of doctors appointments, negative tests, and low-grade stress I never would have had if we’d just started trying when we first talked about it, instead of waiting for all those extra trips.
The biggest lie I bought into was that travel is over once you have a kid. It’s different, sure. We don’t do 12-hour days of hiking or all-night bar crawls in foreign cities anymore. We book places with full kitchens so we can make mac and cheese at 5pm instead of dragging a tired toddler to a fancy restaurant. We drive instead of flying most of the time, to avoid meltdowns over seatbelts and packed security lines. But last month we spent a long weekend at a lake cabin two hours from home, and my daughter spent three hours chasing frogs around the shore and screamed when we made her leave for bed. It was lower key, way cheaper, and more fun than that crowded week I spent hiking through rainforests in Costa Rica trying to check off every tourist spot on my list.
When Lila asked me what she should do, I didn’t give her some vague “follow your heart” garbage. I gave her the three concrete things I wish someone had told me when I was in her spot. First, go get a basic fertility check before you decide to push back trying. It’s just a blood test and a quick exam, it’s covered by most insurance, and it’ll tell you if waiting another 6 or 12 months is something that can actually impact your options down the line. I didn’t do that before I waited, and I would have made a different choice if I’d known my cycle was more irregular than I thought.
Second, you don’t have to choose between your next trip and starting to try. If you already have that big international vacation booked six months from now, start trying now. Most people don’t conceive the first month, and even if you do, most low-risk pregnancies are cleared for air travel and sightseeing in the first trimester. My friend Sarah did this a couple years ago: she had a safari booked for a year out, started trying three months before the trip, figured if she got pregnant she’d go anyway, if not, she’d still have the trip. She ended up conceiving the month before she left, her doctor cleared her, she had a great time, and was back home and into prenatal care by the time she hit her second trimester. No one has to make it all or nothing.
Third, if you’re already craving having a kid, the extra trip won’t fix that restless feeling. Lila told me she’s been ready for a baby for six months, she just feels like she has to check one more big trip off the list because everyone says she should. I told her that a week in Italy isn’t going to make being a new mom easier or harder, it’s just a week away. If you want the trip, take it, but don’t take it just because someone told you you need to.
I got a text from Lila this morning. She booked the basic fertility check for next week, and she’s decided to scratch the big Italian trip she was planning for next spring, and instead book a long weekend in the mountains this fall, then start trying after that. That works for her, and it might not work for the couple down the street who decide to wait two more years to check off all their pre-baby trips. There’s no right answer that fits everyone.
I still have the photos from all my pre-baby trips, stuck in this sticky album on my kitchen table, and I don’t regret taking them. But I also know that if I had to do it over again, I’d start trying sooner, and bring the kid along on the next trip instead of waiting. This year, we’re planning a trip to the beach next summer, and my daughter’s already talking about building sandcastles bigger than her dad. It’ll be chaotic, it’ll be expensive, and we’ll probably go home needing another vacation. But it’ll be ours, and that’s more than any pre-baby last hurrah ever gave me.
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