Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Wish I’d Known Before Deciding
The pasteis de nata crumbs were still dusting the edge of our paper placemat when my husband slid his phone across the table, the notes app open to a bullet point list he’d drafted on the train from Lisbon. At the top, in all caps: WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE NEXT VACATION TO TRY. It was our third anniversary trip, the first of two big getaways we’d planned in 12 months, and we’d been circling the baby question for six months straight.
Everyone we knew with kids repeated the same line so often it felt like fact: Get all your travel in now. You’ll never do this again. Our closest friends had gotten pregnant 10 months after their wedding, and still joked about the two international trips they’d canceled when they found out, trips they still hadn’t taken five years later. Our second planned trip was a long weekend in a Smoky Mountains cabin with my college roommates, two years in the making, the last all-group no-kids trip we’d likely ever coordinate. If I stopped birth control when we got home from Portugal, I’d be right around 12 weeks pregnant when that trip rolled around—statistically, when morning sickness peaks for most people. I wouldn’t be able to do the 8-mile hike we’d signed up for, couldn’t sample the craft breweries we’d mapped, and I’d probably pass out by 9 p.m. instead of staying up late in the hot tub with everyone else.
I pushed the phone back across the table. “Everyone says you don’t get these years back,” I said. “What if we regret rushing this?”
He stirred his espresso and nodded. He’d heard the same stories. But he’d also watched a coworker spend 20 months trying for their first after waiting a year to “enjoy being married” and take a few more trips. “What if we wait and it doesn’t happen right away?” he said. “Then we pushed it back for no reason.”
We ended up waiting. I did the hike, drank the hazy IPAs, stayed up till 2 a.m. playing Cards Against Humanity while fireflies blinked outside the cabin screen. We flew home on a Sunday, I threw my last pack of pills in the bathroom trash that Monday, and I had a positive pregnancy test five and a half weeks later. Our son was born in June 2020.
Four years later, I get a text or DM at least once a month from someone asking the exact question we turned over that weekend in Lisbon: Should I wait to get pregnant until after we’ve taken a couple more vacations? No one warns you this is one of the first small, high-stakes choices you face when you start thinking about kids, caught between other people’s nostalgia for pre-kid freedom and your own quiet timeline for growing your family. After talking through this with dozens of people and living with our own choice for four years, I’ve landed on a few grounded things that don’t come up in generic “travel while you can” social media posts.
First, do the calendar math before you decide, because most people’s mental math is way off. I can’t tell you how many people say “we just want two more trips, so we’ll wait six months to start trying” like that only pushes their baby timeline back six months. It doesn’t. For people under 35 with no known fertility issues, the average time to conceive is one to six months. Add nine months of pregnancy, and waiting six months to start actually pushes your baby’s arrival back 16 months at the earliest, not six. If you’re 30, shifting your first baby from 32 to 33 is negligible for most people. If you’re 34 and already talking to your OB about fertility shifts after 35, that 16-month jump is a much bigger tradeoff for a four-day cabin trip. I always tell people to pull up their calendar, mark the last day of their final planned trip, then count 12 months out. If you’re comfortable having a newborn 12 months after that date instead of 12 months from today, waiting is low-stakes. If that date pushes you past a threshold you care about, that’s a clear reason to reconsider.
Second, sort your trips into two buckets: once-in-a-lifetime planned events, and vague “we should travel more” anxiety. Waiting for a specific, meaningful pre-planned trip is almost always worth it. That Smoky Mountains weekend is still one of my favorite memories from my 20s. Three of the four couples on that trip now have kids, and we haven’t coordinated a single kid-free weekend since. I don’t regret waiting for that for a second. Waiting because you have a vague sense you’re “supposed” to squeeze in travel before kids, with nothing actually booked or planned? That’s almost never worth shifting your timeline for. The world doesn’t close when you have a baby. We took our son to that same coastal region of Portugal this spring, and it wasn’t the same trip we took in 2019. We didn’t linger for two hours over lunch and vinho verde. We spent 45 minutes chasing him around a playground while he chased seagulls, ate pasteis de nata smooshed into his shorts, and went to the local aquarium three times instead of hitting the art museums we’d marked. But we watched him run straight into the Atlantic for the first time, screaming laughing when a small wave hit his ankles, and watched him befriend a Portuguese toddler at the playground even though they shared no common language. It wasn’t worse. It was just different, and the pre-kid trips we want will still be there when he’s older if we want to do them.
I also remind people pregnancy doesn’t automatically ruin travel. So many write off any trip in the first year of trying because they assume they’ll be miserable if they conceive, but most people feel close to normal by the second trimester. A friend did a 10-day Italy road trip at 16 weeks, walked 8 miles a day, ate her weight in pasta, and still calls it her favorite trip—she jokes she didn’t even have to argue about who drove after wine tastings. If your trip is three or more months out from when you’d start trying, odds are you’ll be past the worst first-trimester fatigue and nausea by departure.
We still talk about that choice sometimes, usually when scrolling old photos after our son’s gone to bed. We got lucky: conception happened fast, we got the trip we didn’t want to miss, and the tradeoff was smaller than many people’s. If it had taken 18 months instead of six weeks, we’d have a three-year-old instead of a four-year-old right now, and while I don’t think that would change anything big, I’d be lying if I said I never wonder.
Last month, a 33-year-old friend texted me asking the same question, with her sister’s bachelorette in Mexico planned four months out. I told her there’s no universal right call. Don’t wait because someone told you you’ll never have fun again. Don’t rush because someone called waiting selfish. Just pull out the calendar, be honest about what the trip actually means to you, and go from there. She texted last week she’s decided to wait. I think that’s probably the right choice for her. But I don’t think it would have been wrong if she’d picked the other way, either.
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