Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Our Vacations? What I Learned as a Parent
The last night of our trip to Portugal, my husband and I sat on a small balcony overlooking the tiled rooftops of Lisbon, a half-empty bottle of vinho verde between us. The street below smelled like grilled sardines and warm pavement. We had spent two weeks eating pastel de nata, hiking the coast, and sleeping in late for the first time in what felt like years. And I was already doing the math in my head.
“If we get pregnant this month, the baby would come in the spring,” I said, tracing the rim of my glass. “That’s perfect. We could still do that hiking trip in the Pyrenees in June. Maybe a weekend in Paris before that.”
My husband nodded slowly, the way he does when he knows I’m constructing a plan that will probably collapse. “So we’re saying after this vacation we’re ready?”
“I mean, we said that after the Costa Rica trip too. And after that long weekend in the Alps.”
He laughed. I laughed. And we both went quiet, because the pattern was familiar. Every time we got close to making a real decision about having a child, we would find a reason to wait. Another trip to book, another savings goal, another excuse that looked like responsibility. And now, with the lavender-scented soap from the Airbnb still in my toiletry bag, I was doing it again.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that we weren’t really deciding between a baby and a vacation. We were avoiding a decision about the rest of our lives.
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The next morning, while eating breakfast at a café, I noticed a couple with a toddler at the table next to us. The mother was trying to spoon yogurt into the child’s mouth while the father held a wriggling baby. The mother glanced at us with a kind of knowing smile—the one that says, “Enjoy that quiet coffee, because one day you won’t have it.” I smiled back, but I felt a knot in my stomach. I had seen so many couples do the “one more trip” dance. In my group of friends, three couples had said the exact same thing over dinner a few months earlier. “We’re taking one last big trip,” they’d say, “and then we’ll start trying.”
One of those couples went to Thailand. They got pregnant accidentally on the flight home. The other two are still waiting. They keep adding vacations to the list, and every year the list gets longer. It’s not that they don’t want children. It’s that they don’t want to leave the world they’ve built for themselves as non-parents. And I couldn’t blame them, because I was the same.
We’d been saying “after the next trip” for three years. But the trips kept coming, and the after never seemed to arrive. I remember standing in a souvenir shop in Lisbon, flipping through a guidebook about Portugal’s beaches, when I realized that the reason I kept planning our next vacation wasn’t just because I loved to travel. It was because I was terrified of being stuck at home, exhausted, with a baby who didn’t care about our passport stamps.
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So what did we actually do? We didn’t have a dramatic breakthrough. We didn’t cancel our plans. Instead, we forced ourselves to talk about something more specific than “not feeling ready.” We made a list of what we actually wanted to do before having a baby, and then we split that list into two categories. The first category was “things that genuinely require being childless”—like doing a multi-day trek or attending a festival that starts at midnight. The second category was “things that are perfectly doable with a child, just in a different way.” That’s when we noticed that almost every item on our list was in the second category.
We wanted to see the northern lights. That’s not a baby thing. You can put a baby in a carrier and watch the sky in a winter jacket. We wanted to eat at a quiet Michelin-starred restaurant. That one is harder, but not impossible with a babysitter or a wise choice of an early dinner. We wanted to learn to surf. Traveler’s surf camp with a baby? Maybe not ideal. But that one is a small item, not a life decision.
The real insight came from a conversation we had with a pediatrician friend who had two kids under four. She told us something I still think about: “You’ll never feel done with your pre-baby life. You just decide to fold it into the next chapter.” She said that she and her husband had tried to do all their “never again” things before their first child, and they ended up spending three years in a state of perpetual anticipation, feeling like life was on hold. Then they had a baby, and within two years, they were taking trips with him to Iceland, and the baby loved it. They hadn’t lost travel. They just had to carry more snacks.
That conversation helped me reframe the question. It wasn’t “Should we wait to get pregnant after a couple more vacations?” It was “What are we actually waiting for?” If the answer is “so we can feel fully satisfied with our adult life,” then the honest truth is that satisfaction doesn’t work like that. There will always be another place to see, another city to explore. The list of destinations is infinite. But the line you cross into parenthood is a one-time transition. You can do it now, or you can do it later, but there is no version where you do it after “everything else.”
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We did end up trying for a baby after we came home from Portugal. We didn’t get pregnant that month. Or the next. And for a while, I found myself reverting to an old habit: “Maybe we should take another trip to clear our heads,” I’d say. But my husband was more grounded than I was. He said, “We can’t vacation our way into a decision that only happens at home.”
So we started doing the practical work instead. I made an appointment with my midwife to talk about preconception health, not just travel schedules. We reviewed our budget, not for a trip, but for the first year of childcare. We started converting some of our travel savings into a separate “family fund.” It felt unromantic. It felt like filling out spreadsheets while our friends were posting Instagram stories from Bali. But it was the first time we had stopped treating parenthood as something that would happen after we returned from somewhere else.
One concrete thing that helped was setting a simple rule for ourselves: If we ever brought up a future trip as a reason to delay pregnancy, we had to write down the specific reason why that trip couldn’t happen with a baby. Most of the time, we couldn’t write anything convincing. That’s how we learned that the “one last vacation” was less about the vacation itself and more about the idea that we had time.
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We’re parents now. Not right away—it took about a year, which is its own story. And we still travel. We took our daughter to the Scottish Highlands when she was eight months old. She spent most of the trip staring at sheep through the car window, and we spent most of the trip adjusting schedules. It wasn’t the same kind of travel, but it was travel. We’ve learned that you don’t have to choose between a life with a child and a life with experiences. You just have to accept that experiences look different for a while.
I still meet couples who are trying to get in a few more trips before starting a family. I don’t tell them what to do. I just ask them what they’re hoping those trips will give them. Sometimes it’s rest. Sometimes it’s adventure. Sometimes it’s a feeling that they haven’t missed out on life yet. And sometimes, after they talk it out, they realize that a child doesn’t take that away. It just changes the order of events.
For us, the decision to stop delaying wasn’t really about being completely ready. It was about admitting that we would never be completely ready—and that the people who are ready are just people who decided to say yes with their eyes open. We still have a long list of places we want to see. But now the list has a name, and she’s sitting on my lap while I type this, reaching for a plastic bottle she absolutely does not need. We’re planning a trip to the Azores this spring. She’ll be two. I have no idea how she’ll do on the flight. But I do know this: the wait we thought we needed turned out to be a fear we didn’t, and we’re grateful we stopped postponing. Not because everything is perfect, but because “later” was starting to sound like “never.”
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