Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Couple of Vacations? A Teacher Mom’s Perspective
The question surfaced between the rental car desk and the parking garage in Lisbon. My husband had the map app open, our four-year-old was trying to unbuckle her seatbelt for the third time, and he said, “So are we still going to try next month, or do we wait until after Maine too?” We had made a deal months earlier: no pregnancy tests until after two vacations. One in Portugal for my cousin’s wedding, and one week in Maine with my parents. Just us, our daughter, and the idea that we’d get one more stretch of lightness before everything got more complicated.
I teach kindergarten, and I know a little about transitions. But this was different. This wasn’t a child moving from the red table to the blue table. It was me, sitting in a rental car in a foreign country, trying to decide whether to give up something I hadn’t even gotten yet.
For two years, I had been saying I wanted another child. But I kept attaching conditions. First I had to finish a school year without crying in the supply closet. Then my daughter had to be fully out of diapers. Then we had to paint the guest room. Then we booked the Portugal trip and the Maine trip, and I told my husband that after those, we’d really try. He didn’t argue. He just agreed, the way you do when you know your partner is not ready for a conversation.
The vacations weren’t really about planes and hotels. They were about a feeling I didn’t remember anymore. For a long time, I’d felt less like a person and more like a piece of furniture that everyone wiped their hands on. My students, my daughter, my husband, the dog. I wanted one more trip where I wore a normal bra and drank wine with dinner and didn’t have to say “please use your walking feet” forty times a day.
Portugal was not that trip.
Our daughter refused to eat anything that had “eyes” on it. She cried at a restaurant because the fish was looking at her. I spent a morning in a pharmacy buying children’s acetaminophen that we didn’t need and then arguing with my husband about whether to walk or take the tram. At the wedding, she danced in a flower crown for exactly six minutes before falling asleep on someone’s couch, and I spent the rest of the evening carrying her to the car, smelling her hair, wondering why I’d been so afraid of losing this version of us.
When we got home, I still didn’t know what to do. So I did what I often do when I’m stuck: I looked at the pattern instead of the problem.
In my classroom, I see the “before baby” season all the time. Parents come in for conferences and say things like, “We’re taking our daughter on a special trip before the baby comes,” or “We’re trying to get her into a big-girl bed before her brother arrives.” We talk about how they’ve done everything right. But then, on the playground, the older sibling often does something I expect: she puts a baby doll in a basket and walks away. She says, “No, I’m not the mom. I’m just the big sister who helps.” That’s not a problem. That’s a child trying to find her place before the new baby actually exists.
What I tell parents might sound counterintuitive. Don’t spend months creating a perfect pre-baby summer. Spend two weeks creating a small, predictable ritual that stays after the baby arrives. For our family, it meant letting my daughter be in charge of the baby’s blanket. We bought a soft green blanket, and from the moment we brought it home, she was the only one allowed to touch it. She picked it up with her whole chest, carried it around, and announced, “This is for the baby.” It wasn’t about the blanket. It was about having a job that no one else could take.
The Maine trip was different. We still went, and we still had a good time, but I was already a little bit pregnant by then. I didn’t feel magical. I felt tired and queasy and cold, and I sat on the porch watching my parents play with my daughter while I drank ginger tea and wondered if I’d made a mistake. My daughter was four, still my baby. Did I really want to put her through this? Did I want to put myself through this?
There’s no clean answer. That’s the part that makes it hard.
Parents ask me whether a two-year gap is better than a four-year gap. I’ve seen both work. I’ve also seen that the gap matters less than whether the older child has a lane. Not a job, exactly—a lane. A way to be separate. A role like “blanket keeper” or “bath time DJ” or “the one who gets to tell the baby about the day.” When the older child has something that belongs only to them, they can welcome a sibling instead of just surviving a disruption.
We also need to be honest about what vacations are for. If you’re waiting until after a couple of trips because you want to sleep in, drink freely, and move without a stroller, that’s not a timeline. That’s a fantasy. There will always be another reason to wait. Another season. Another classroom assignment. Another pair of shoes to buy. If the real goal is to feel like yourself again, no two-week itinerary is going to give you that. You need something smaller and more regular. For me, it was swimming laps twice a week and drinking my coffee while it was still hot. That did more for my sense of self than all the vacation planning in the world.
Now, months later, I’m sitting on my porch while my daughter plays at the edge of the yard. The baby is due in October, right when school starts. Some mornings I feel ready. Some mornings I don’t. My daughter still asks to be carried sometimes, and I still do it, even though it hurts my back. She also brings the green blanket to me and says, “This is for the baby when they’re cold.” She doesn’t know what’s coming. Neither do I, honestly.
If someone asked me today whether they should wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations, I’d say, ask yourself what the vacations are supposed to do. If they’re about rest, take a weekend and don’t plan anything. If they’re about control, understand that control doesn’t survive a baby anyway. And if they’re about holding onto a version of your life that feels lighter, you don’t lose that version—you just have to learn to recognize it in a new form, one that might look a lot like carrying a sleeping four-year-old through a Portuguese parking lot, wondering if this is exactly what you were afraid of, and being okay with not knowing.
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