Should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of pre-baby vacations? What I learned from my choice
Last month, I stood in my sister’s backyard wiping melted cherry popsicle off my 10-month-old’s wrist when my 26-year-old cousin Lila pulled me aside, twisting her new engagement ring around her finger. She glanced over at her boyfriend Jake, who was flipping burgers and laughing with my brother, and lowered her voice. “Me and Jake already checked off all the pre-baby trips people talk about,” she said. “We did two weeks backpacking in Japan last spring, and a week at the beach in Cabo for my best friend’s bachelorette. But everyone keeps saying we should do one more big trip, wait another year before we start trying. Should I wait to get pregnant?”
Five years ago, I was asking the exact same question. My husband and I had just wrapped two back-to-back trips: a month-long road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, camping and stopping at every weird roadside attraction we saw, then a long weekend in New Orleans for our anniversary. All our married friends with kids kept telling us the same thing: get all the travel out now, because once you have a baby, you’ll never get to do that again. I was 28, and I’d been ready to start trying for months. But that little voice niggled. What if I regretted it? What if I spent the next 10 years cooped up at home, wishing I’d seen the Amalfi Coast before the late nights and diaper changes?
So we waited. We spent 12 months cutting back on groceries, skipping dinners out, throwing every extra dollar into a travel fund to go to Italy. I planned the itinerary for three months, marking every vineyard and historic square we’d visit. When we finally left, I found myself checking my ovulation app every morning over breakfast. I turned down glasses of local wine because I worried I’d get pregnant early by accident, and I kept rushing us back to our Airbnb by 9 PM because my app said my fertile window was closing in two days. I spent more time thinking about getting pregnant than I did enjoying the view of the Mediterranean. When we got home, we added up our receipts and realized we’d spent more on that two-week trip than we’d put toward our down payment for a house that whole year.
Then, three months after we started trying, I had an early miscarriage. That extra year of waiting suddenly felt like a big, heavy weight. I spent a lot of time that year thinking about the choice I’d made, and talking to other friends who’d made different choices. One friend of mine got pregnant right after her two pre-baby trips, no extra wait. She has a four-year-old now, and last year we went camping together in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She told me she doesn’t regret skipping that extra big trip at all. “Yeah, we don’t do two week international trips every year anymore,” she said, wiping mud off her kid’s boots. “But we do long weekends, and we bring him along, and it’s fine. I got my kid a year earlier, that’s worth way more to me than one fancy trip.” Another friend waited three extra years for more trips, and she says that was right for her—she wanted to hit a career milestone first, and she enjoyed every trip she took without stressing about when she’d get pregnant.
What I’ve learned is that most of the time, when people ask if they should wait, they’re not actually asking about travel. They’re asking if they’ll regret rushing into parenthood, or if they’ll regret waiting. And there’s a middle ground that almost no one talks about. When Lila asked me for advice, I didn’t tell her to wait or not to wait. I told her to do two specific things, instead of putting her life on hold for a year. First, answer this out loud: are you ready to start trying right now, apart from what your mom or your friends or Instagram have told you? If the answer is yes, don’t wait a whole year for a big international trip. Book a four-day long weekend to the place you’ve been wanting to go, take it in the next three months, and that’s enough to scratch the itch. Second, if you’re really worried you’ll never travel again after baby, put a $50 deposit down on a small trip for 6 or 8 months after your due date. You don’t have to plan the whole thing, just lock in a cabin or a cheap hotel at a beach an hour from home, so you have something to look forward to. That way, you don’t have to delay starting your family just to know you’ll get another trip soon.
I tried that second trick after my son was born. I booked a cabin in the Smoky Mountains for when he was 7 months old, put $40 down, and forgot about it until a month before we were supposed to go. It was messy—he spit up on the only blanket I brought, he woke up three times a night, we spent half the trip running to the store for extra diapers. But it was fun. We sat on the porch at night after he went to sleep and drank beer, and watched the fireflies, and it was just as nice as any fancy trip I took before he was born.
Last week, Lila texted me. She and Jake booked a four-day trip to Nashville for next month, they’re staying at a cheap Airbnb and going to see all the country shows they’ve wanted to see. They called the doctor yesterday to schedule their preconception checkup for the week after they get back. They didn’t wait a whole year. They didn’t rush into something they weren’t ready for, either.
I still have the photos from my trip to Italy taped to my fridge. I’m glad I went. I also know that if I hadn’t waited, I would have had my son a year earlier, and that would have been okay too. There’s no perfect answer that checks every box. For most people, if you’ve already had your couple of vacations, you don’t need to wait another year just to check one more big trip off the list. But if you want an extra little trip before you start, you can have that without putting your whole plans on hold. That’s the thing no one tells you: the trips don’t stop when you have a baby. They just change.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of pre-baby vacations