Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple Vacations? An Honest Parent’s Take
“If we start trying in September, we’ll have just wrapped the lake trip and my sister’s wedding in Cabo. That’s two whole vacations without a newborn attached,” my husband said, prodding a lukewarm fish taco with a plastic fork. Sand was crusted into the hem of my swimsuit coverup, and I was scrolling the same 10-line fertility forum thread I’d opened three times that day, all from women asking the exact question we were dancing around: should we wait to get pregnant until after we’ve checked a couple more trips off the list?
Lila, our 3-year-old, was passed out in her stroller next to our patio table, one hand curled around a half-melted lollipop, the ocean breeze lifting fine strands of hair off her sun-warmed forehead. We’d done this same dance before she was born, too. Back then, we’d booked a 12-day backpacking trip through Portugal and northern Spain six months before we planned to start trying, and we pushed our timeline back eight months just to be safe. I set three separate phone alarms every day to remember my birth control on that trip, terrified a random positive test would ruin the whole thing. We ate pasteis de nata at 10 p.m. and hiked coastal cliffs at sunrise and it was wonderful, but when we got home and stopped birth control, it took seven months to get pregnant. Seven months I’d spent convinced we had to cram all possible fun in before a baby, when I could have spent the first trimester wandering those same cliffs, stopping for extra pastry breaks whenever the nausea hit.
That’s the quiet catch no one brings up when they tell you to “travel while you can”: conception rarely sticks to your Google Calendar timeline. I’ve talked to dozens of women in my local mom group who assumed they’d get pregnant their first month trying, only to wait six months, a year, longer. A friend of mine pushed trying back two full years to check Japan, a cross-country road trip, and a Tuscan food tour off her list, then got pregnant on her first try. She says she doesn’t regret the trips, but she was 35 when she gave birth, and her gestational diabetes and high blood pressure turned a low-risk pregnancy into twice-weekly nonstress tests and an induced delivery at 37 weeks. Her doctor said the two-year gap likely made a difference, and that’s the tradeoff she rarely sees discussed online. On the other end, another friend got pregnant six weeks after her wedding, three months before a long-planned trip to Portugal. They rebooked for when their son was 18 months old, ate a lot of supermarket bread and cheese for dinner because he wouldn’t sit through fancy restaurants, and left saying it was one of their favorite trips ever. They’re already planning a kid-free return trip next year, when his grandma can watch him for 10 days.
Sitting on that beach patio, while my husband ran to get us mango ice cream from the stand down the boardwalk, I pulled up my notes app and stopped trying to answer the question with a simple yes or no. Instead, I listed every trip we actually wanted to take in the next five years, and sorted them without really trying into three loose groups, a trick I’ve since passed to three different friends wrestling with the same call.
First, the trips that are genuinely hard with most kids under 5: multi-day backcountry hiking, 10+ day international trips with back-to-back sightseeing and 8 p.m. dinner reservations, multi-stop music festivals, anything that requires moving hotels every night. Those are the trips it makes sense to prioritize if they’re non-negotiable for you, especially if you’re under 32 and have the flexibility to wait a few months without shifting your long-term fertility odds much. Second, trips that are different with little kids, but not worse: week-long beach rentals, national park car camping, visits to extended family overseas. You just slow the pace, book a rental with a kitchen instead of a cramped hotel room, and build nap time into every day. We were on that exact beach trip with Lila when we had this conversation, after all. We spent the morning building sandcastles and chasing seagulls, and we both got up at 6 a.m. with her to watch the sunrise, neither of us even annoyed about the early wakeup. Third, trips that are actually more fun with little kids: any trip centered around animals, playgrounds, pick-your-own fruit, or silly roadside attractions. Before Lila, I never would have planned a vacation around a children’s museum or a petting zoo, but last spring we detoured to a tiny apple orchard in Vermont on a leaf-peeping drive, and she ate three cider donuts in 10 minutes and covered both of us in cinnamon sugar. I still think about that afternoon more than I remember most of the fancy dinners we had on our pre-kid Portugal trip.
The other myth I’ve let go of is the idea that we have to stockpile all our kid-free fun before we get pregnant, like once the baby comes our passports get revoked forever. Two months before that beach trip, Lila spent three nights at my mom’s house, and we booked a tiny cabin 45 minutes outside the city for just the two of us. We didn’t pack an itinerary, we got takeout barbecue, watched a terrible 90s action movie we’d been meaning to see for years, and hiked a trail without carrying a 30-pound toddler on our hips. It was better than almost any trip we took before we had Lila, because we didn’t spend the whole time rushing to the next thing or checking work emails or worrying we weren’t “making the most” of our time away. That time doesn’t disappear forever. It just comes in smaller chunks, once you have people you trust to watch the kids. We’ve already asked my mom to block off a week next spring for another kid-free trip, and she said yes before I finished the sentence.
We left that beach trip without a hard rule about when we’d start trying for the second. We’re not actively preventing pregnancy, but we’re also not rushing it to hit some arbitrary deadline. We bought travel insurance for the Cabo flights, something we never bothered with in our 20s, so if I end up too far along to fly, we can transfer the ticket or get most of our money back. We moved the lake trip from a remote backcountry site to a car campground with flush toilets, just in case I’m tired or nauseous by then.
Last week, I saw that same forum thread pop up in my search history, and a new comment had been added from a woman who said she waited three years for “a couple more vacations” and now she’s struggling to conceive, and she wishes she’d just started trying sooner. Another comment right below it said she got pregnant on her honeymoon, canceled two big trips, and has never once regretted it. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for every person, every timeline, every set of priorities. Last night, Lila fell asleep in the car on the way home from the grocery store, and my husband reached over and squeezed my hand, and said whatever happens, we’ll figure the trips out as we go. I think he’s right. We don’t have to pick between vacations and a baby. We just have to stop acting like one cancels the other out.
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