Should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations? What I learned as a mom
I’m wiping blueberry scone crumbs off my toddler’s booster seat at our local coffee shop when Lila leans across the table, voice low, and asks the question she’s been turning over for three months. She and her husband just got back from their second big international trip in a year—one to the Amalfi Coast, one to Costa Rica, both booked specifically to check the “pre-baby vacation” box off their list. Now she’s staring at me, rain streaking the window behind her, and asks: Should I wait even longer to get pregnant, after we’ve already had these two?
I’ve been where she is. Five years ago, my husband and I got married, and every older person we knew told us to travel as much as we could before we had kids. “You’ll never get that freedom again,” they said. So we waited. Three years, four big trips: a two-week backpacking trip through Portugal, a road trip up the Pacific Coast, a long weekend in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, a beach trip to Belize. I checked every box, crossed off every destination I’d pinned to my “pre-baby” Pinterest board. By the time we started trying, I was convinced I’d done it right—no regrets, no what-ifs.
What no one told me was that even after all those trips, the what-ifs didn’t go away. After we got pregnant, I found myself worrying we should have done one more trip to Japan, one more week of sleeping in until 10am with no one needing a bottle at 6. When my son was 10 months old, we took our first family trip: camping at a state park an hour from our house. I spent half the trip chasing him around the campground, the other half pumping milk in our tiny tent, and we left a day early because he got a mild poison ivy rash. I remember driving home, covered in campfire ash, thinking that all those people were right—travel with kids is nothing like travel before kids. And for a minute, I was glad I’d waited.
But then last summer, we took him to the Outer Banks. He was two, and he spent every day covered in sand, eating popsicles that dripped down his arms, and chasing seagulls that stole our potato chips. One night, we carried his sleeping body back to our rental after a walk on the beach, and my husband and I sat on the porch eating ice cream, talking about how that trip was just as good as any we took before he was born. It was just different. We didn’t hike 10 miles a day or stay out drinking till 2am. We built sandcastles and napped in the afternoon and went to bed by 9. It wasn’t the travel I’d dreamed of pre-kid, but it was ours.
When Lila asks me if she should wait, I don’t give her the generic “follow your heart” speech. I tell her to pull out her phone right there, and write down the three things she’s actually scared of losing, not the generic “freedom” everyone talks about. She thinks for a minute, and writes: 1. Sleeping in any day I want. 2. Spontaneous 10 mile hikes. 3. Fancy dinners that take three hours. Then I tell her to write down next to each one how she could still do that after she has a kid. She crosses out the first one and writes: Husband can take the kid to get donuts on Saturday. Second: My mom lives 20 minutes away, she’ll watch him one weekend a month for a hike. Third: Babysitter costs $20 an hour, we can afford one every three months for a date night. By the time she’s done, she’s laughing. She realized most of the things she thinks she’ll lose don’t actually go away—they just happen less often, and feel more special when they do.
I also tell her the other quiet truth: if you’ve already had your couple of vacations, the odds are you’re just delaying because you’re scared, not because you actually need more trips. I spent an extra year delaying because I kept finding another trip I wanted to take. There’s always a destination you haven’t been to, another trip you can squeeze in before you start trying. Waiting doesn’t make the fear go away, it just pushes back the thing you actually say you want.
If you’re really craving one more big trip, don’t delay a whole year for it. Take a four-day long weekend to the place you want to go. Cut out a couple of takeout nights for a month to pay for it, and go. You’ll get the break you need, and you don’t have to put your pregnancy plans on hold if you’re ready. And if getting pregnant takes longer than you expect, that extra year of waiting matters more than that extra trip, for a lot of people.
Lila left the coffee shop that day saying she and her husband are going to take that long weekend trip to the lake they’ve been talking about this September, then start trying. I don’t know if it’ll work first try, I don’t know if she’ll look back in five years and wish she’d waited longer for another trip to Europe. I still have days where I think I wish I’d had my son a little earlier, when I had more energy for late night wakeups. I still look back at my photos from Portugal, laughing with my husband at a street taco stand at 1am, and those are good memories. They don’t feel wasted, even though I have a kid now who wakes me up at 6am every day.
The thing no one tells you is that vacations don’t end when you have a kid. They just change. And if you’ve already had the couple you wanted, there’s no prize for waiting longer. It’s okay to stop putting the next part of your life on hold.
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