Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After My Vacations? What I Learned Putting Baby Plans On Hold
I was folding a pile of swim trunks and stained toddler onesies last Tuesday when my phone pinged. A text from my friend Lila, who’s been talking about starting a family for the past two years: “All my Instagram feeds say I need to take all my trips before the baby comes. I’ve got a girls’ Mexico trip in six months and a national park road trip with Jake next spring already booked. Am I being stupid if I don’t wait? Should I actually hold off getting pregnant until after we go?”
My coffee was getting cold on the coffee table, and my 2-year-old was in the other room stacking plastic bowls into a tower that she’d knock over in 10 seconds. I leaned back against the couch and thought back to four years ago, when I was sitting in exactly the same spot, asking myself the exact same question.
My husband and I had three big trips planned. Two weeks in Japan, a destination wedding for his best friend in Portugal, and a long weekend of backcountry camping that we’d booked a year in advance. Everyone we talked to had an opinion. My mom kept dropping hints that we “weren’t getting any younger” and should get started. Our kid-free friends yelled that we’d never get another chance to sleep in until 10 a.m. and hike 10 miles in a day, so we should absolutely go first. We landed on waiting 18 months, get all the trips out of the way, then start trying.
The trips were everything everyone said they’d be. We hiked up a mountain outside Tokyo at 4 a.m. to watch the sunrise over Mount Fuji, ate so much pasteis de nata in Lisbon I thought I’d have to buy a whole new suitcase, and fell asleep under the stars with no 2 a.m. wakeups for a wet bed or a bad dream. It was magical. But what no one talked about was the weird limbo of those 18 months in between. I put off buying a new couch because “the baby will just stain it anyway.” We didn’t repaint the spare room because it was going to be a nursery, so we just left it with the chipped off-white paint it had when we moved in. I found myself turning down happy hours with friends who had babies, because I didn’t want to hear all their birth stories and get impatient. I was half-in on the trips, but half already waiting for the next thing to start.
We started trying right after we got home from the camping trip, and I got pregnant the first month. I got the baby, I got the trips, it was the perfect plan everyone told me to make. But in the four years since, I’ve watched enough friends go through this to know it doesn’t always work that way. One friend waited two years to check off four big international trips before trying, only to find out she had low egg reserve that made getting pregnant way harder than anyone expected. She told me last year she still loves the photos from those trips, but she wishes she’d started trying earlier and just rebooked if she needed to.
When I texted Lila back, I didn’t give her a yes or no. I gave her the three concrete things I tell anyone who asks this question now. First, pull up your booking confirmations right now and check the cancellation and transfer policy. Most airlines and hotels will let you move your trip to a different year for less than $100, and most travel insurance covers pregnancy-related cancellations these days. You don’t have to choose between your trip and starting your family right now. If you get pregnant before you go, you can either go on the trip pregnant (I took a babymoon to the coast when I was five months along, and it was way more relaxing than any trip I’ve taken since—all I did was eat lobster and nap on the beach) or move it to after the baby is older. There’s no need to put your whole baby plan on hold just because a trip is booked.
Second, schedule a 15-minute check-in with your OB before you decide. If you’re under 30 and have no history of irregular periods, endometriosis, or fertility issues, waiting a year for two trips is almost never going to be a problem. But if you’re over 35, or you know you have any factors that might make getting pregnant harder, that doctor can tell you how waiting 6 or 12 months changes your odds. I’ve seen too many people make this decision based on what a 25-year-old influencer on TikTok says, not their own body’s actual context.
Third, notice if you keep adding more trips to the list. When I was waiting, after we’d booked our three, I kept saying “oh we should do a weekend in Napa too, just the two of us.” It took me a while to admit that the trips weren’t the real reason I was waiting. I was scared. Changing your whole life to have a kid is scary, and it’s really easy to hide that fear behind a list of pre-baby trips you “have” to take. If you’ve got your two trips booked and that’s it, that’s one thing. If you keep adding new ones every time you get close to starting trying, that’s something worth naming.
Lila called her OB the next week, checked her Mexico trip policy, and decided to start trying this month instead of waiting. She told me if she gets pregnant before the trip, she’s just going and drinking all the virgin margaritas she wants. I still pull up my photos from Japan sometimes, and I’m glad I went. I don’t regret waiting. But I also know that if I’d gotten pregnant before that trip, I would have figured it out. It would have been a different kind of good, not a worse one. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. Some people want all their trips in the bank before they start, and that works for them. Some people don’t want to wait, and that works too. The only mistake I see people make is following the rule someone else made up for them, instead of picking what fits their own life.
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