Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After My Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The mimosa bubbles were going flat in Lila’s glass when she leaned across the wobbly brunch table, voice dropping like she was asking for a secret. She dragged her sun-bleached phone out from under her striped beach towel, still dusted with fine sand from her Costa Rica trip two weeks prior, and tapped to a photo of her and her husband mid-yell on a zip line, green jungle stretching out below them. “I know we planned these two trips before starting to try,” she said. “But now that they’re done, everyone’s asking why we didn’t just start earlier. Should I have waited? Or is waiting fine?”
I told her I’m the wrong person to ask for a one-size-fits-all answer, because I did the exact opposite. My husband and I booked our dream 10-day trip to Japan six months after we got married, put $1,200 down on hotels and flights, and found out I was six weeks pregnant three days before we were supposed to leave. We talked about postponing, but we couldn’t get the deposit back, and we both figured we’d just adjust. I spent the first three days hunched over the hotel toilet, too sick to walk past the convenience store down the block. I couldn’t eat the raw fish I’d been dreaming of for years, and we bailed on the Fushimi Inari hike after I got winded climbing the first 15 steps. Most nights, I was asleep by 8, while my husband watched old samurai movies alone on our tiny ryokan TV. We came home with a blurry photo of me wrapped in a blanket in front of Mount Fuji, and a positive pregnancy test taped to our fridge.
I’ve spent a lot of time since then wondering what it would have been like to wait for that trip. The first two years after our son was born, we didn’t go anywhere further than my in-laws’ cabin two hours away. I was breastfeeding, he had bad eczema that flared up every time we changed his water or routine, and the thought of navigating a 12-hour plane flight with a crying baby felt impossible. Even now, at four, a week-long trip abroad means packing half a suitcase just for snacks, extra clothes, and his favorite worn stuffed bear, and we’re both more tired at the end of the trip than we were before we left. So I get why Lila wanted to take those trips first. She wanted the unrushed, spontaneous experience that’s really hard to pull off once you have kids.
I’ve had so many friends ask this same question lately, it feels like the default expectation now is to check off a big list of travel before you have kids. But most of the advice floating around is either vague fear-mongering about “waiting too long” or generic claims that you’ll “never travel again once you have kids.” No one talks about the small, concrete things you can do to make the choice that fits you.
The first thing I tell anyone considering waiting is that if you’re planning to wait more than six months, and you’re 30 or older, go get a baseline fertility blood test. It’s a simple draw, most insurance covers it, and it gives you a much clearer idea of where you stand than random comments from your aunt at Thanksgiving. My cousin waited five years to start trying, checking off one big trip after another, and when she finally went to the doctor, she found out her egg count was lower than expected, and ended up paying $30,000 out of pocket for IVF. She doesn’t regret the trips, but she says she wishes she’d known earlier what she was working with, so she could have adjusted her timeline instead of being caught off guard.
Second, if you’re waiting for a specific set of trips, write those trips down and set a hard end date for your waiting period. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “one more trip”: after the Italy trip, there’s the African safari you always wanted to take, after that the ski trip in the Alps. Before you know it, three or four years have passed. Lila and her husband set this rule a year ago: we’ll do the two trips we’ve been saving for, then start trying the next month. No extensions, no adding more trips to the list right now. It’s a small, low-effort step that keeps you from drifting into a longer wait than you actually wanted.
Third, be honest with yourself about what kind of travel you actually want, and whether you can have that experience with kids. If you want to backpack through the Himalayas for two weeks, or stay out until 2 a.m. drinking wine at a beach bar in Portugal, or hike 10 miles a day through national parks, that’s really hard to pull off with a toddler or young kid. It’s not impossible, but it’s not the same experience. If that’s the memory you want, it makes total sense to do it first. If you just want a week at a beach resort where you can sit by the pool, that’s totally doable with a kid—you just bring a grandparent along to help, or book a place with a kids’ club—so there’s no reason to wait years for that.
Back at brunch, Lila pulls up a screenshot of her test results on her phone. She got the baseline test a month ago, her numbers are solid, she’s 31, and she feels fine about the 18 months she waited to take her trips. She’s starting trying next month. We split a plate of salty fries, and she says she’s not worried anymore. She did the trips she wanted, she checked the facts that matter to her, and she’s ready.
I think about my messy, unplanned Japan trip, how it wasn’t what I dreamed of, but I still have that blurry photo of me grinning in front of Fuji, even when I was exhausted and sick. I think about Lila’s loud, joyful zip line photo, that’s her memory to keep forever. There’s no perfect answer here. Some people wait and it works out, some people don’t wait and it works out. The only mistake I see people make is letting other people’s rules decide their timeline, instead of sorting out what matters for them. Right now, Lila’s happy with her choice, and I’m happy with mine. We’ll see what happens next.
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