Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Few Pre-Baby Vacations? A Parent’s Real Perspective
The sticky outdoor table at our local Sunday brunch is dotted with ketchup smudges and half-eaten fries when Lila slides her phone across to me, thumb hovering over a photo of her standing on a cliff in the Azores, wind tangling her hair, a half-empty bottle of local wine in her hand. “It was perfect,” she says, and then she pauses, picks at a chip in her hiking nail polish, and drops the question I knew was coming. “Should I wait to get pregnant to do a couple more of these, or should we just start trying now?”
Lila and her husband have spent the last two years checking off the pre-baby travel bucket list everyone talks about. Two weeks in Costa Rica, a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway, a food tour through Italy, now this trip to Portugal. Everyone they know keeps saying “go now, before you’re tied down” so that’s what they’ve been doing. But her 33rd birthday just passed, and she’s started wondering if all this waiting is actually a good idea. I get it. I was sitting right where she is five years ago, my own pre-baby Japan trip photos stacked on my camera roll, the same question looping in my head.
My husband and I put off trying for a baby for 18 months to squeeze in two big trips and three long weekend getaways. I’d bought into the hype hook, line, and sinker: once you have a kid, you’ll never sleep in, never wander a foreign city alone, never take a vacation that doesn’t involve sippy cups and tantrums over scratchy hotel sheets. When we got home from Japan, I unpacked our lumpy hand-thrown pottery souvenirs on the living room floor and felt both ready and terrified. I’d checked all the boxes, so why did I still feel like I was giving something up?
A year later, my son was born, and three months after that, we booked a trip to visit my in-laws in Mexico. I was convinced it would be a disaster. I packed three extra changes of clothes for me, a whole box of diapers, a portable sound machine, every possible thing I could think of that might go wrong. He threw up on me 20 minutes into the flight. He refused to nap anywhere but my arms. But when he was 10 months old, he sat on the beach and ate sand for an hour, giggling so hard he snort-laughed, and I realized that the whole “no more fun travel after kids” thing was mostly overblown. It’s different travel, sure. I don’t get to spend six hours wandering an art museum stopping at every painting. I do get to watch my now three-year-old chase feral chickens around a coastal town, and that’s its own thing. It’s not worse, just different.
I’ve talked to so many parents in my playgroup who’ve gone both ways. Some waited three years to check off all their trips, and some got pregnant on their honeymoon with zero pre-baby travel. The big difference I’ve seen isn’t how much fun people have later, it’s whether people waited for the right reasons, not just because someone on Instagram told them to. I told Lila that when I’m asked this question, I don’t give some generic “follow your heart” answer. I tell people to work through three small, concrete things first.
First, actually add up how long the waiting will take, and how that lines up with any fertility concerns you might already have. I have a cousin who waited five years to do four big pre-baby trips, and by the time they started trying, they were dealing with age-related fertility issues that added three more years of waiting and a lot of expensive medical bills. That doesn’t mean you have to rush if you’re young and healthy, but it does mean you shouldn’t put off starting trying just to check a trip off a list someone else made for you.
Second, check your bank account. How much of your starter baby fund are you putting toward these trips? Lila told me her dream safari in South Africa would cost them almost as much as a year of part-time childcare for a baby. If draining your savings to go now leaves you stressed about how you’ll pay for diapers or a new car seat when the baby comes, that’s a lot more unnecessary strain than putting the trip off for five years. Most countries and national parks don’t disappear, and you can go when you have the budget for both.
Third, ask yourself if you actually want the next trip on your list, or if you’re just scared of what having a baby will do to your life. A lot of people I know keep adding more trips to the list because they’ve bought into the idea that having a kid ends your life, so they keep putting off the big change. That fear is normal, but it doesn’t mean you have to wait forever. I kept adding random long weekends to my list back when I was waiting, and I realized half of them were just me running from the scary part of starting a family, not because I actually wanted to go.
After we pay the bill and walk out to the parking lot, Lila leans against her car and thinks about that safari. She’s wanted to go since she was a teenager, she says, but she didn’t want to push starting trying past her 34th birthday. “What if we move it up from next fall to this spring?” she says. “Do the safari, then start trying after that. That way we get both.” I tell her that sounds like a good plan to me. I don’t tell her it’s the perfect plan, because there is no perfect plan.
I drive home to pick up my son, and when I walk in the door, he’s covered in glitter from a craft my mom did with him, and he runs at me yelling for a snack. I don’t regret the trips I took before I had him. They were nice, and I’m glad I got to go. But if I’d started trying a year earlier, I don’t think I’d regret that either. There’s no one right answer to this question. Some trips will happen before baby, some will happen after, some will happen when the kids are grown and you have the whole car to yourself again. Whatever you choose, you’ll make it work. I don’t know what Lila and her husband will end up doing, but I know it won’t be the disaster everyone online makes it out to be, no matter what they choose.
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