Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? A Parent Educator’s Honest Take
The question came from my friend Elena across a café table, halfway through an iced tea. She and her husband had been talking about starting a family for months. But they had also booked two trips: a long weekend on the coast in May and two weeks in Portugal in September. Now she was holding a small paper napkin, drawing little circles on it, and she looked up at me and said, “Do you think we should wait to get pregnant until after those trips? Or am I just making excuses?”
I knew that feeling. Before I had my daughter, I spent a whole year doing what Elena was doing. My husband and I kept saying, “Let’s do this trip first,” or “Let’s just have one more summer where we can sleep in.” We went to a rented cabin in the mountains. We walked around cities with no plan. We had long, slow breakfasts and late-night conversations that didn’t get interrupted by a teething baby. And part of me is genuinely glad we did those things. That year was real. It was restful in a way that parenting rarely is.
But I also remember the strange pressure inside that year. Every nice moment had a little edge to it, like it was supposed to count double. Every trip was also a countdown. We were trying to fill up a tank before we knew the road would get harder. And I think that’s the real question underneath Elena’s: not “Can I travel while pregnant?” but “How do I know when I’m ready for a baby?”
There’s no clean answer, but there are some honest ones.
First, let’s talk about the trips themselves. In my experience, a lot of people assume pregnancy means you can’t travel. That isn’t automatically true. I had a friend who went to Japan in her second trimester and had a wonderful time. She was tired, but she was tired at home too. I had another friend who threw up every day until week 20 and could barely drive to work, let alone sit on a plane. You can’t predict which one you’ll be. That uncertainty is exactly why it’s reasonable to want to take a vacation before getting pregnant. If you’ve been looking forward to Portugal, and you’ve paid for it, and your body is going to do whatever it wants anyway, then there’s no shame in saying, “Let’s go now.” That’s not a selfish choice. It’s a practical one.
But here’s where the conversation gets more complicated. After the trips are over, there will always be another reason. There’s the work project, the family move, the holiday with your in-laws, the renovation project you want to finish. I’ve watched people wait for the moment when everything becomes still and blank and open, and then realize that moment doesn’t exist. If you keep waiting for the calendar to empty out before you have a child, you may be waiting for a very long time.
What I try to tell parents who are in this place is to separate two different questions. One is: “Do I want to take these vacations while it’s still just the two of us?” The other is: “Am I avoiding the unknown?” Those can look the same from the outside, but they feel different on the inside. With the first one, you can make a plan. You book the flights, you enjoy the trip, and you feel settled afterward. With the second one, no trip will ever be enough. You’ll come home from Portugal and immediately start looking for another reason to wait.
I think that’s why it helps to get concrete about what the vacation actually means. If the answer is “I want to sleep until noon for seven days,” then yes, do that before you’re pregnant. Newborns don’t respect noon, and later pregnancies don’t always let you sleep comfortably anyway. But if the answer is “I want to feel like I’ve lived a little before I become someone’s parent,” then that feeling isn’t going to be satisfied by one trip. No trip can make you feel fully ready for the fact that someone else’s whole day will depend on you waking up at 4 a.m. for a feeding.
There’s also a simpler angle: having a baby changes what vacations are. We took our daughter to the beach when she was nine months old, and I’ll be honest, it was a lot of work. We packed a portable crib, a bottle warmer, more diapers than seemed physically possible, and a small pharmacy of baby medicine. We spent most of the week watching her sleep monitor on a phone screen while sitting in a rental condo. But I don’t regret it. She touched sand for the first time, and it made her laugh. That memory is real too. It’s just a different kind of real than sitting in a café in Lisbon with a glass of wine and no nap schedule.
From a child development perspective, this is also worth remembering: babies don’t need their parents to have seen the world before they arrived. They need parents who are present. They need predictable rhythms, a calm adult who responds when they cry, and a safe place to sleep. Whether that place is a nursery at home or a rented room in another country matters a lot less than we think. What matters more is whether you feel reasonably grounded in your daily life. If you’re constantly exhausted, resentful, or panicked about money, those feelings will leak into parenting no matter how many beautiful trips you took before.
So if someone like Elena asks me, here’s what I actually say. If the trips are booked and they’re important to you, take them. Go. Enjoy them. Eat the food, walk the streets, stay up late. And then start trying if you still want to. There is no medal for getting pregnant sooner, and there’s no prize for waiting either. But if you’re going to wait, give yourselves a real date, not a condition. Say, “We’ll take these two trips, and then we’ll start trying in October.” That gives you something specific to look forward to and keeps you from sliding into an endless string of “one more thing first.”
And if you decide not to wait, because the timing feels right even with the trips on the calendar, that’s okay too. You can still travel while pregnant. You might have a wonderful time, or you might spend a week in a hotel room eating crackers and watching TV. Both are survivable. Neither is a sign that you made the wrong call.
I don’t know what Elena will decide. I know she sent me a photo last week from the coast, both she and her husband smiling in the wind, and I’m pretty sure there was a margarita in front of her. Maybe she’ll have another drink in Portugal, and maybe she’ll be holding a positive test instead. Either way, the trips are not the real thing at stake. The real thing is whether she and her husband can trust themselves to make a choice and then move forward without second-guessing.
For me, that trust came later than I expected. There were plenty of exhausting, confusing months after my daughter was born. I remember sitting on the floor at 2 a.m., wondering why we’d been so worried about plane tickets and hotel bookings when we hadn’t understood how much the ordinary mornings would change. But I also remember that year before she existed, with its slow breakfasts and quiet walks, and I think it helped me show up a little less hungry for rest when she needed me.
Would another trip have made the difference? I honestly don’t know. I suspect not. But I’m also not in a rush to prove it.
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