Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations: What I Learned From Waiting
I’m wiping melted vanilla ice cream off my 3-year-old’s neon swimsuit at a Cape Cod snack bar when Lila, my college roommate, leans across the sticky picnic table and asks the question she’s been texting me about for months. “So. Should I wait to get pregnant after we do those two European trips we’ve been planning? We’ve had them booked for three years, post-COVID, saved every extra dollar skipping takeout, but everyone’s in my ear saying we’re being stupid to wait.” My kid drops her half-eaten popsicle in the sand right as I’m about to answer, so I haul her up to the bathroom to rinse off her sticky arms, and when I come back, I tell her the truth I didn’t get five years ago when I was asking the same question.
Five years ago, I was 29, sitting on my older cousin’s backyard deck, twisting my own engagement ring, asking her the exact same thing. My partner and I had a 10-day trip to Japan booked, postponed once, and then a two-week road trip through the Southwest national parks planned for six months after that. We wanted kids, bad, but the trips had been our light at the end of two years of lockdowns and a stressful house purchase. My mom was calling every other week to remind me my fertility “drops off a cliff” after 30, my coworker had just told me I was being selfish for putting my desire for sightseeing above starting a family, and I was a mess of guilt and wanting.
My cousin poured me another glass of iced tea, and told me what she’d learned. She’d waited two years to do a safari trip to South Africa before trying for her first, she was 34 when she started trying, and it took three years and two rounds of IVF to get pregnant. “I don’t regret the trip for a second,” she said. “It’s the best trip I’ve ever taken. But I wish I’d gone to the doctor first, asked what my actual odds were, instead of just assuming everything would work out. I got lucky in the end, but I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I’d checked before I waited.”
That was the piece of advice I took and ran with. The next week, I booked a 20-minute pre-conception checkup with my OB. I didn’t need fancy blood work or anything, just asked her straight: I’m 29, no history of PCOS, regular cycles, my mom had three kids easy, how bad is it if I wait 18 months to start trying after two trips? She leaned back in her chair and said, “For you, personally, it’s totally fine. If you were 37 or had known fertility issues, I’d tell you to go for it now or freeze your eggs first, but waiting a year and a half isn’t going to change anything for you.” She told me to start taking prenatal vitamins right away, stay on my regular exercise routine, and that was it.
So we waited. We went to Japan, and we ate tonkatsu at a tiny hole in the wall at 10pm, wandered around Kyoto’s bamboo groves for three hours without checking a watch, slept in until 9am every single day. We got lost in the Tokyo subway and ended up at a tiny cat café that we never would have found if we’d had a stroller and a napping schedule to keep. Then we did the road trip, got a flat tire outside Moab, camped in a site with no showers, ate gas station burritos for three days straight, and stayed up until midnight stargazing because we didn’t have to wake up to get a toddler to preschool. It wasn’t just “fun”—it was the last time we got to be just us, no one depending on us for every little thing, for a really long time.
When we got home, we started trying, got pregnant on the third try, and now here I am, wiping sand off a toddler at the beach. Is vacation with a kid fun? Yeah, it is. I love building sandcastles with her and watching her chase seagulls. But it’s not the same kind of fun. I haven’t slept past 7am in three years. I spend more time cleaning up snacks and applying sunscreen than I do actually relaxing. That’s fine, that’s what this phase is, but that doesn’t mean the phase I had before kids wasn’t important.
The thing no one tells you about this question is that there’s no one right answer, but there are concrete steps you can take to make the best choice for you, instead of just listening to everyone’s opinions. First, book that 20-minute pre-conception checkup before you decide. Ask your doctor your personal risk, not the generic stats you see online. If you’re over 35 or have known fertility issues, ask about freezing a few eggs or doing a preliminary workup before you wait a year or two. If you’re young and healthy, the doctor will probably tell you waiting for a couple trips is no big deal, and that takes a lot of the weight off.
Second, don’t let anyone guilt you for wanting those trips. A lot of people act like the time before you have kids is just a waiting period, something to get through so you can start your “real life.” That’s garbage. Your 20s and 30s before kids are your real life, and the memories you make then matter just as much as any memories you’ll make with your kids. It’s not selfish to want them.
Third, if you do decide to wait, take one small step to cover your bases: start taking prenatal vitamins now, cut back on heavy drinking if you can, and get any pre-existing conditions under control before you start trying. That way, you’re not starting from zero when you get home from your trips.
Lila twists her engagement ring again, and says her doctor already told her the same thing mine told me—she’s 32, healthy, waiting 18 months is fine. She’s just scared of what if something goes wrong. I tell her that’s normal. There’s no choice that’s 100% risk free. If you get pregnant now and cancel the trips, you’ll probably be happy you have your kid early, but you might still wonder what that trip would have been like for the rest of your life. If you wait and have trouble getting pregnant, that’s really hard, but you’ll still have those memories of the trips that you saved for for years.
My kid tugs on my arm and says she wants to go back to the water, so I stand up to grab my sunscreen bag. I tell Lila I can’t make the choice for her, but if I had to do it again, I’d do the exact same thing. We walk toward the beach, and Lila stays at the picnic table, pulling out her phone to look at her hotel bookings for Paris. It’s still not a done deal, but at least now she’s got the facts she needs to decide.
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