Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Having a Couple of Vacations? A Teacher’s Take on Planning Around Trips
“So, my husband and I have been saving for two big trips—a safari in Kenya, then a sailing week in Greece. If I get pregnant now, I’ll miss both. Should we wait?”
Elena leaned across the coffee shop table, her hand wrapped around a mug of chai she wasn’t really drinking. She was a friend from college, not a parent herself yet, and she was asking me this because I teach kindergarten. She had this way of making big questions sound like light conversation. I stirred my flat white and thought about the kids in my class.
“Do you remember Leo?” I asked her. “The one whose parents sent me that postcard from Patagonia.”
She didn’t remember. I didn’t expect her to. I told her anyway: Leo’s parents had spent three years saving for a massive South American adventure. They got engaged on a glacier, got married, and then immediately started trying to conceive. They got pregnant six months later, right before their planned two-month trip. They went anyway, with me telling them to pack for morning sickness and not to expect too much. They came back tired, slightly sunburned, and pregnant. Leo was born nine months later, and his parents used to joke that the trip was their “goodbye to freedom.”
Leo was the calmest kid I’ve had. He adjusted to our classroom routine within a week. He didn’t melt down at transitions, didn’t cling to the cubby hooks. I’m not saying that was because of the trip; honestly, it was probably just his temperament. But his parents always told a particular story about that trip, and they told it with a kind of ease. They’d say, “We hiked the Inca Trail while I was throwing up,” and then laugh. That story became part of how they saw themselves as parents. They’d handled the hard part already.
I also thought about Mia. Mia’s parents had not taken any grand pre-baby trip. They had a surprise pregnancy right after a cross-country move, a new job, and a leaky roof. Mia’s first year was chaos. I only knew her as a four-year-old, so I’m sure I missed the hard parts, but she was securely attached, curious, and fine. Her parents were tired, but they were present. On the first day of school, Mia held my hand for exactly two minutes, then let go and went to the block shelf. No huge farewell event had preceded her birth. She didn’t need one.
I told Elena all of this, then I said what I actually thought: the question isn’t about the vacations. It’s about the fear of losing a certain kind of freedom. You’re not really asking whether the timing is right for a baby. You’re asking whether you’ll resent the baby if you miss out on two trips you’ve been planning for years. And no one can answer that except you.
But here’s what I’ve seen in the classroom: children don’t keep score. Your son or daughter will never know that you went to Greece or didn’t. They won’t care that you trekked through the jungle or stayed home and painted the nursery. They’ll know the stories you tell, the way you talk about your life before them. If you tell them, “We had this amazing trip before you were born, and then you came along and made everything better,” they’ll feel that. If you tell them, “We gave up so much for you,” they’ll feel that too.
So I gave Elena two concrete pieces of advice, not because I had all the answers, but because she was spiraling a little, and spiraling doesn’t help anyone get pregnant.
First, if the trips are really important to you, then consider whether they’re actually compatible with pregnancy. A two-week sailing trip in Greece might sound like a dream, but at twenty weeks on a small boat, you may not feel dreamy. A safari has real considerations for pregnant travelers: the long drives, the dust, the limited access to medical care. You can talk to your doctor and check travel advisories, but the honest version is that some trips are better before a baby is inside you, and some are better before a baby is in your arms. If you wait, you might be waiting for a trip that, once you’re actually there, feels stressful.
Second, if you decide to get pregnant now, you don’t have to cancel the trips. You can adjust them. You can turn the safari into a baby moon at a game lodge that has a decent clinic nearby. You can swap the sailing trip for a rented cottage on a Greek island, where you can nap in the middle of the day. You’ll still be taking a trip, but you won’t be pretending you’re the same person who doesn’t have a life growing inside her. That’s a good practice for parenting, honestly. The kids don’t ruin the trip, but the trip has to bend around them.
I also thought about a kid from my class a few years ago, Daniel. His parents had done the “one last trip” thing—a three-week tour of Southeast Asia, right before they started trying. They told me it was the most exhausting trip of their lives, because they were still afraid they’d wasted it. They spent the whole time checking a fertility app and worrying. They got pregnant on the last day, and when I met Daniel eight years later, his parents had become relaxed, mostly because they’d realized that the trip wasn’t a magic portal. It was just a trip.
Elena looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “But what if I get pregnant and then we have to cancel the safari, and I never get to go on a safari ever again?”
“You might,” I said. “But you might also take your kid to a safari when they’re eight, and watch their face when they see a lion for the first time, and that will be a completely different kind of thing.”
She sighed. “I know you’re not telling me what to do.”
“I’m really not,” I said. “I just want you to stop treating the vacations like a checkpoint you have to pass before life can start. Your life is already happening. A baby coming into it isn’t the end of that life. It’s the part where you suddenly start paying attention to what actually matters.”
We finished our coffee. She told me she’d talk to her husband. I didn’t hear from her for a while. Then, the following spring, she messaged me a photo from a rented cabin by a lake. No wifi, a stack of library books on the porch, and one of those little pee sticks balanced on the railing, two pink lines clearly visible in the sunlight. The caption said, “We’re not waiting.” A week later, she sent another: “Actually, we’re going to try to do a shorter version of the safari in my second trimester. Wish us luck.”
I didn’t reply with advice that time. I just wrote back, “Have a good trip.” And I meant it.
I still don’t know if they went. The next year, she sent me a picture of a baby in a carrier, sitting in a rental car by the same lake, staring at the water like it was the most enormous thing she’d ever seen. I think maybe that was the trip that mattered. Or maybe it wasn’t. That’s the thing about decisions like this—you never really know which part of the plan mattered until you’re on the other side, holding something small and warm and completely unconcerned with whether you got to sleep under the stars before they existed.
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