Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? A Teacher Mom’s Take
At the gate, my husband was doing that thing where he holds up both boarding passes like they’re winning lottery tickets. “We got the exit row,” he said. I nodded, but I was actually counting days on my phone calendar. Our daughter was four. We had spent the last two years saying “maybe next spring” about another baby, and then booking flights instead.
The trip was supposed to be the “last one.” A family vacation with just the three of us before we started trying for a second. But somewhere between the airport coffee and the boarding call, I had a thought I didn’t expect: maybe we should wait one more cycle. Maybe we should book one more trip after this one. The idea of a baby was still abstract. The breakfast buffet with a child who no longer needs a diaper bag was not.
Over the next week, I found myself watching our daughter with a weird kind of attention. She ran from the waves on the beach, then asked me to carry her up the boardwalk. Her legs were too long for the baby carrier we’d packed “just in case.” That evening, she fell asleep between us in the hotel bed, and I lay awake thinking: next time, there will be a crib in the corner and a white-noise machine and someone who wakes up at 4 a.m.
I teach kindergarten, and I watch families go through this all the time. Parents come back from “one last trip” and announce they’re trying. Or they cancel a trip because they’re already pregnant and say they’ll go “someday.” I never used to think much about it until we were the ones standing at the gate.
A friend of mine put it this way: “You have to understand what the vacation is for.” She and her husband had waited to try for their second until after a planned trip to Japan. They ate sushi every night, hiked a mountain, and stayed out until midnight. She told me, “When I was pregnant and exhausted, I kept thinking about that trip. Not because the baby would have kept me from it, but because I had the memory of being fully myself right before I became a mom all over again.”
That made sense to me, but it also felt a little too clean. Our vacations weren’t bucket-list trips. They were beach houses with sand in the car and a mountain cabin where our daughter spent an hour putting rocks in a jar. There was no wine tour. There was just us, practicing the ordinary rhythm of being a family without work deadlines and school pickup.
That’s the thing I don’t think people say enough about waiting. It’s not about the destination. It’s about the attention. When you know a pregnancy might be coming, you stop looking at your current child the same way. You start measuring life in “last times.” Last time we can fit her in the single stroller. Last time we can book a hotel room with one bed. Last time I can carry her through an airport without another human strapped to me.
Those “last times” matter. Not because a toddler can’t handle a sibling. She can, probably. But because I needed to feel them. I needed to be the one carrying her, not constantly thinking about the life that would come after.
As a teacher, I’ve seen what happens when parents rush into a new baby without a pause. That’s not a judgment—most of the time, they’re fine. But I’ve noticed that the parents who mention a trip before a sibling are more likely to say things like “we had our moment” when their older child is struggling with jealousy. They have a memory to reach for. They can tell their child, “Remember when we went to the beach and you slept in our bed? We had that time, just us.” The child may not remember. The parent does. And that memory changes the voice they use when they’re exhausted and saying no for the hundredth time.
So if you’re asking, “Should I wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations?” I would ask you a different question: What do you need the vacation to do?
If you need to know life won’t be over after a baby, a trip won’t fix that. You’ll come home and get pregnant and still feel a little panicked when you see the positive test. That’s normal. If you need a concrete deadline, book the trip. Put the deposit down. Don’t overthink the doctor’s appointment—you can have it when you’re back.
A low-friction way to figure it out: sit down with your partner and each name one thing you’d be sad to miss before another pregnancy. Not a list. One thing. For my husband, it was taking our daughter to the aquarium without worrying about nap time. For me, it was sleeping until 7:30 and not needing to pour milk for anyone but myself. Those are different. But both were real.
We did take the trip. It rained for two days. We ate a lot of pancakes, and our daughter learned to jump over waves on the last afternoon. I cried a little on the plane home, not because I was sad, but because I knew we were going to start trying next month. Then we didn’t. Our daughter got strep throat. I had a work deadline that ate an entire week. The water heater broke. Life got ordinary, and ordinary life has a way of making you want to wait until “everything is settled.”
Eventually, we did get pregnant. Or maybe we haven’t yet—that’s not actually the point. The point is that the vacations were never the real line in the sand. They were just a way to remind myself that I could choose. I could choose to go, and I could choose to wait, and either choice came with a season of uncertainty.
I still don’t have a clean answer for whether you should wait. I can only tell you what I tell the parents in my classroom: if you can take the trip, take it. If you can’t, stop checking the calendar. The baby will come when they come, and the beach will still be there. But if you go, be present. Let your current child stay up late. Let them share your bed. Carry them through the airport even though they weigh too much. Say yes more than you usually do. That week is for you.
And when you get home, you still might decide to wait a month or two. That’s fine. The trip wasn’t wasted. It was practice for paying attention to what’s right in front of you, which is exactly the skill you’re going to need when you’re up at 3 a.m. with a newborn and a preschooler who wants cereal.
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