Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? What Our Family Decided
The last day of preschool before spring break, I stood by the cubbies while my son took off his shoes by himself. He got one shoe off, then stopped and stared at the strap. A few months ago, he would have called my name. Now he just twisted it around, worked the buckle, and slid his foot in. His teacher came over and said, “He’s really growing up fast.”
She didn’t know what was on my mind. She didn’t know that my husband and I had made a plan.
The plan was simple: take two vacations, one to Portugal and one to a long weekend in Montreal, then start trying for a second baby. We had been talking about it for months. I was almost thirty-five, and I knew the clock mattered. But we also knew that once we had two kids, a trip like Portugal would become a very different thing. So we circled the dates on the kitchen calendar. We booked the flights. We told ourselves this was the last stretch of adult travel, the kind where you can walk around a city until midnight and eat dinner without cutting someone else’s chicken.
Standing by the cubbies, though, I felt a small crack in the plan. My son was not a baby. He was almost four. He could put on his own shoes, ask for a playdate, tell me about a dream. If we waited through two vacations, he would be four and a half when the baby arrived. If we started now, he would only be four. I knew that didn’t sound like a big difference to most people. But watching him buckle his shoe, I realized that a few months isn’t a few months to a preschooler. It’s a visible chunk of his entire life.
At home, I opened my planner. The trips were marked in blue. Under the second trip, I had written “start trying” in pencil, with a question mark. I kept looking at the question mark.
I brought it up with my husband after dinner. He was loading the dishwasher, and I leaned against the counter and said, “You know, we don’t actually have to wait.”
He turned off the water. “Wait for what?”
“For Portugal.”
He gave me the kind of look he gives when he’s not sure if I’m asking or just thinking out loud. “We already spent eleven hundred dollars on flights.”
“I know. But we’re deciding about a person, not a vacation.”
That was the first time either of us said it out loud. The vacations weren’t really about the vacations. They were about having one more stretch of life where we didn’t have a newborn. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem was that we had started treating the vacations as preparation for something, as if we needed to empty out our old life before we could begin a new one.
What helped was making a list. Not a pros-and-cons list, just a list of what each choice would actually look like.
If we went to Portugal, we would walk a lot. We would climb hills, take long afternoon train rides, eat late dinners. Could we do that with a baby? Not really, not the same way. Could we do it with a toddler? Maybe not well. But could we do it with a school-aged kid? Sure. We could put off that trip until our son was eight and bring him along. He might not love the hills, but he could walk. He could carry his own water bottle. He could remember it.
Montreal was different. Montreal was a short flight, easy food, lots of parks. We could do that with a stroller. We could do that with an infant in a carrier. We could even do it during the newborn blur, if we scheduled it well and kept our expectations low. So the question became: which vacations were actually “now or never”?
I think that’s the real question underneath “should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations.” It’s not about whether you deserve the trips. You do. It’s not about whether you’re being selfish to take them. You aren’t. It’s about whether the thing you’re waiting for is something you can genuinely only do before a baby, or whether it’s just a nice idea you’ve attached to a calendar date.
There is a developmental side to this, too. We tend to think about pregnancy timing in terms of age gaps between siblings. Two years feels close. Four years feels far. But what matters more is how the older child experiences the change. A two-year-old knows a baby is coming because you tell him, but he doesn’t really get it. A four-year-old can sort of understand that a baby takes up a lot of time and that he will need to wait sometimes. That doesn’t make one age gap better than the other. It just means you’re making a different trade.
Our son was already showing signs that he was ready to be around a baby. He had started caring for a doll at school, wrapping it in a blanket and pushing it in a little stroller. His teacher mentioned it one afternoon. She said, “He seems interested in taking care of something.” She wasn’t giving me advice. She was just telling me what she saw.
That moment pushed us over the edge. We made a decision: we would still go to Montreal, but we would move up our timeline. We would not wait for Portugal. We would cancel that trip and rebook it for a few years down the road, when the family could go.
We didn’t cancel Portugal because we were trying to be noble. We canceled it because we realized the trip was not worth what it cost us in time. And time with our son before he became a bigger brother was worth more than a week of walking around Lisbon.
So we went to Montreal. It rained. We walked through the botanical gardens with an umbrella, let our son eat poutine, and spent one evening sitting in the hotel lobby reading while he fell asleep in the room. It was not a wild vacation. It was a good one.
Three weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.
The pregnancy was harder than I expected. There were weeks when I couldn’t get off the couch. I had planned to take our son to the pool every day, but instead we made play dough volcanoes on the living room floor. He didn’t mind. He was still getting me in the way that mattered.
I don’t know if waiting through those two vacations would have changed anything. Maybe I would have been less tired at the start. Maybe I would have been more tired because I’d be flying back from Portugal with jet lag and a toddler and a newly implanted embryo. I honestly can’t say.
What I do know is that we stopped treating the vacations as a finish line. They were just trips. And the baby wasn’t something waiting at the other end of them. The baby was already becoming part of our family the moment we started letting ourselves imagine it.
Now I look at that calendar and laugh. We kept the blue circles and the little question mark. The flights to Portugal never got rebooked. We lost the fare difference. But the question mark stayed in pencil, and every time I see it, I remember that the decision wasn’t about timing. It was about what we were willing to give up for a certain version of life.
We’re about to have two kids, and I still don’t know which plan was better. But I know that the best part of that spring was not the trip we took. It was the afternoon, a few days before we left, when our son put his hand on my stomach and said, “Is the baby in there?”
I said yes.
He nodded and went back to his toys.
That was enough.
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