“Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations?” — A Real Look at Timing, Travel, and Growing a Family
We were sitting on the balcony of our hotel room in Lisbon, sharing a bottle of vinho verde and watching the trams rattle by below. It was day four of our ten-day trip, and the sun was just starting to set. My husband turned to me, half-joking, and said, “So, if we want to take a trip like this again, we should probably do it before a baby comes. Or maybe two more trips? Give ourselves a proper send-off?”
I laughed, but I knew he was serious. We’d been saying “we should wait a few more months” for over a year. The timeline kept shifting—first we needed to pay off the car, then we wanted to enjoy the summer, then his work project needed the fall to settle down. Now the new variable was vacations. We had this romanticized idea that we needed to see the world as a pair before we put it on pause. The thought of pregnancy was tangled with the thought of losing something—spontaneity, sleep, easy international flights. So the question hung in the air: Should we wait until after a couple of vacations?
The truth is, there is no clean answer. But sitting there, with the evening light slanting across the city, I started to untangle what we were really asking for.
At first, the wait seems logical. You want one last long-haul flight where you can drink coffee on your own schedule. You want to hike a mountain trail without carrying a diaper bag. You want to stay out late at a dinner that starts at 9 p.m., which is already past your usual bedtime anyway. These are legitimate desires. A vacation as a couple before becoming parents is not a frivolous thing—it is a way to strengthen the relationship that will later hold the weight of a family. There’s a reason those “babymoon” trips exist. The idea of saving up a few precious memories to carry into the sleepless nights has real appeal.
But I also realized we were using “one more vacation” to postpone something that was inherently uncertain. There will always be a reason to wait. Maybe you want to move to a better school district first, or you need a new kitchen, or the job promotion is coming next spring. The question isn’t whether the timing is perfect—it never is—but whether you are willing to accept a little bit of chaos. A baby doesn’t respect your itinerary. That is the first thing you learn.
We spent the rest of that week talking to other travelers and people we knew back home who had already taken the plunge. One friend, a teacher with a two-year-old, told me something that stuck. She said, “We did the opposite. We got pregnant first and did the travel thing later. We took our daughter to Japan when she was fourteen months old. It was exhausting, but we did it. You don’t have to stop traveling because you have kids—you just become a different kind of traveler.”
She had a point. In her case, the trips didn’t disappear. They just changed shape. They brought pacifier wipes and a portable changing pad to a temple in Kyoto. They had a toddler meltdown in the middle of a busy fish market. But they still went. The vacation wasn’t the soft romantic getaway we imagined, but it was its own kind of adventure.
Still, there’s a practical angle that deserves attention. If you are planning to get pregnant, there are some real physical considerations around travel. First trimester fatigue is not a subtle thing. It can make even a short flight feel like a marathon. If you are planning a vacation to “recharge” and then conceive, you might feel a pressure to make the trip the best ever before you start feeling nauseous on a packed bus. That pressure can actually stress you out more than the trip relieves.
On the other hand, a vacation before trying can serve as a gentle reset. It gives you a chance to sleep, eat slowly, and enjoy a few beautiful days with fewer work emails. The body benefits from that kind of restoration, and so does the mind. If you can handle situations with a bit of extra patience, that will serve you well later, when your toddler refuses to get into the car seat.
What I started to realize, sitting on that balcony and later talking it over at home, was that the choice wasn’t strictly about the vacations. It was about recognizing that you’ll never feel fully ready for parenthood. No amount of trips can change that. There is no “right” pair of final trips that will give you absolute certainty. There is just the trip you take now, and the imagination you have for the ones you’ll take later with a child or perhaps with grandparents in tow.
In the end, we decided to take the two vacations. Not because we were convinced it was the smartest plan, but because we wanted to. We booked a quiet weekend in a coastal town for early fall, and a longer trip to the mountains the following spring. It was a little selfish, and I knew that. But there’s a version of this that isn’t lazy—it’s intentional. You take the time to be a couple on purpose, so that when the baby comes, you have less regret about lost opportunities. You can let go of “what we never got to do” and welcome the new phase without looking back.
That doesn’t mean it’s the right answer for everyone. If you have been trying to conceive for a long time, the vacation wait can feel like a painful delay. If you are in your late thirties or forties, a year of two vacations might feel like a lot of time in a window that’s already narrowing. Those are real factors, and no travel agent can solve them for you. The only thing you can do is be honest about what you’re willing to trade.
A friend of mine, who is a midwife, put it this way: “You can plan all you want, but your body and your baby will have their own timeline. You just have to show up for it.” That phrase “show up for it” stayed with me. A vacation is a nice way to show up for yourselves before a bigger event comes along. But if you wait for the perfect set of experiences, you might be waiting for a long time.
There is also something about knowing that once pregnant, your body will shift in ways that are entirely beyond your control. That can be unsettling and freeing at the same time. You can’t control the nausea, the stretch marks, or the unexpected exhaustion. But you can control how you start it—with a good sleep, a long walk, or a sunset view from an unfamiliar city. Those small things become the foundation, not the big plan.
As we landed back home, the luggage full of dirty clothes and postcard souvenirs, I still didn’t have a definitive answer. The trips looked like a good idea, sure. But they didn’t magically resolve anything. We were still uncertain. We woke up the next morning in our own bed, jet-lagged and tired, and the question was still sitting on the kitchen counter. It hadn’t solved itself.
Maybe that’s the point. The vacations aren’t a verdict. They’re just a pause. They give you space to think without the usual distractions, which sometimes means you come back with more clarity, and sometimes you come back with the same doubts wearing a sunburn. Either way, you’ve lived a little, you’ve breathed some ocean air, and you’ve been together without a million other obligations for a few days. That’s never wasted.
We haven’t booked anything else yet, and I don’t know if we will. The timeline is still vague. But I know this: the value of the trip wasn’t in putting off the pregnancy. It was in reminding ourselves that we exist as a pair, before we become a trio. And when the timing finally does line up—whether it’s next summer or a year after—we’ll have those two little trips tucked into our pockets, small proof that we knew what we had before we grew our family. The rest, I suspect, we’ll learn as we go.
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