Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Having a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Real Take
I’m picking at a crumb of sourdough on a chipped blue ceramic plate at our favorite patio brunch when Lila leans forward, twists the stem of her mango iced tea, and asks the question she’s been turning over for two months. She and her husband just got back from their second big trip this year: a 10-day vacation in Portugal, after a fall trip to Japan that they’d been saving for since their wedding two years ago. They want to start a family, but every time they mention starting to try to someone, they get the same line: Wait, enjoy your freedom while you can. Why rush? You won’t get trips like this again once you have a baby.
I know that feeling. Three years ago, I was sitting in that exact same seat, sun through the awning dappling my water glass, just back from a two-week Iceland road trip and a week of beach time in Costa Rica. My husband and I had our own little timeline: check off the two big trips, then decide when to start trying. And just like Lila, I got hit with so much unsolicited advice that I started second-guessing our timeline. Was I being stupid for even thinking about starting right after our trips? Should I wait another six months, another year?
I ended up waiting six months. Looking back, that six months was nothing special. We went to the same grocery store every Sunday, hiked the same local trail most weekends, binged the same shows we’d been binging before our trips. There was no magical last hurrah of couple time that I would have missed if we’d started trying right away. I got pregnant six months after we got home, had my son a year and a half later, and I’ve learned a lot about this question that no one tells you when you’re young and planning your timeline.
First, the most basic concrete step you can take right now, before you decide anything, is to shoot a quick email to your OB or midwife. A lot of the anxiety around waiting after travel comes from random anecdotes online, not actual medical guidance. If you traveled to an area with active zika or malaria transmission, your provider might recommend waiting a month or two to reduce any risk to a fetus. If your trips were to most places in Europe, North America, or popular beach destinations with no ongoing outbreak-related risks, there’s almost no medical reason to wait at all. I wasted a month panicking that the mosquito bites I got in Costa Rica would hurt a baby, only for my doctor to tell me that unless I had symptoms of an infection, there was nothing to worry about. That 10-minute email took all that unnecessary stress off the table.
Then, let’s talk about the big reason most people wait: the idea that you’ll never get to take a nice vacation again once you have a baby. I bought into this completely, which is why we waited those six months to cram in… well, nothing, as it turned out. I thought after we had a baby, we’d be stuck at home forever, no trips, no fun, just diapers and bedtime. That’s not what happened. When my son was 10 months old, we drove four hours to stay with my parents in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. It was nothing like our Iceland trip: I didn’t get to spend three hours wandering a Reykjavik bookshop drinking lattes, and we didn’t stay out past 9 PM. But after my son went to sleep, my husband and I sat on the porch drinking beer and watched the fireflies, and that was still a vacation. We took a long weekend to the beach last summer, and yes, we had to bring a whole cooler of pureed food and a pack ‘n play and a million diapers, but we still got to sit on the sand and watch him splash in the shallow waves. Trips with kids are different, but they don’t stop existing.
That said, if you have a big trip you’re dying to take that you know you can’t do pregnant or with a young kid—like that Inca Trail hike you’ve been planning for years, or that two-month backpacking trip through Southeast Asia—then obviously go take it first, and wait to get pregnant. That’s your call, and it makes total sense. The problem only comes when you’re waiting to get pregnant not because you want more vacations, but because everyone else told you that you need more vacations.
When Lila and I walked out to the parking lot after brunch, she said she’d realized that she and her husband already checked off every trip they’d been wanting to take before kids. They’d spent the last two years taking those vacations, they were done with that phase of their timeline, and they were ready to start trying. She was just scared everyone was right, that she’d regret it. I told her I don’t regret waiting my six months, but I also don’t think it would have been a mistake if I hadn’t. I still have a framed photo from that Iceland trip hanging above my son’s changing table, and every time I change his diaper at 2 AM I look at it. I don’t sit here and think I wish I’d waited longer. I don’t sit here and think I wish I’d started earlier, either. It just is what it is.
She said she’s going to text her OB tonight, ask about any required waiting period, and if everything checks out, they’re going to start next month. I hugged her goodbye, got in my car, and headed home to pick my son up from daycare. There’s no perfect answer to this question, no right or wrong timeline that fits everyone. The only wrong move is waiting because someone else told you to, when you’re already ready. Some people want more time, some don’t, and that’s all there is to it.
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