Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After We Travel More? A Mom’s Honest Answer
The morning after we got home from Lisbon, I stood in the kitchen with a suitcase that still smelled like airplane. We’d told everyone that trip was our “last before baby.” But somewhere between the pastel de nata and the jet lag, my husband looked at the calendar and said, “I don’t feel done. Maybe we book one more?”
I didn’t know if he meant one more trip or one more year. The question felt bigger than vacation time. It was about whether we were really ready to trade our current life for a completely different one. And because we were lucky enough to be able to consider the timing, we had the luxury of stalling.
If you’re asking whether you should wait to get pregnant so you can have a couple more vacations, you’re probably not asking about the itinerary. You’re asking how to know when you’ve had enough.
We tried to answer it by making a list. Not a bucket list—that felt too dramatic. Just places we wanted to see at a slow pace: a small town in Mexico for a week, a train through Switzerland, a beach where we could read for four days straight. My husband wrote down “trekking in Patagonia.” I wrote down “sleeping late in a Paris hotel room.” We stared at the two lines.
“Could you do Patagonia with a baby?” he asked.
“People do,” I said. “But I don’t think I could do Patagonia with a baby and still enjoy it.”
That was the honest part. It wasn’t that travel with kids is impossible. It’s that some kinds of travel require a selfishness you can’t fake when you’re responsible for a small person who doesn’t understand why they can’t have another snack. The question became less “should we wait?” and more “which vacations are about freedom, and which are about connection?”
I think that’s the real fork in the road. A couple of extra vacations won’t stop you from missing your old life. They might even make it worse, because you’ll know exactly what you’re giving up. But if you wait until you feel 100 percent ready to shift into parenthood, you’ll wait forever. Nobody is ready for the shift. You just decide to let the last ferry go.
Now, from the other side, I can give you a few concrete things that helped us.
First, separate “travel as escape” from “travel as curiosity.” Escape you can get closer to home. A weekend at a rental house with no plans can scratch the same itch as a week abroad, if you’re honest about what you need. Curiosity is different. It’s about having the energy to explore, to get lost, to tolerate discomfort. That kind of travel does get harder with a baby, but it doesn’t disappear. It just becomes slower, and slower can be fine.
Second, if you’re trying to time a trip around a future pregnancy, don’t book anything too far ahead. I know that sounds like the opposite of helpful, but hear me out. We learned that pregnancy is a moving target. You might feel great at five months and awful at seven. The best plan is a flexible one. If you book a trip for “after I give birth” as a reward, keep in mind that a 10-day itinerary with multiple flights and a strict schedule will not feel like a reward at eight months postpartum. It might feel like a second job.
We didn’t wait. In fact, we booked a small trip for when I was about four months pregnant. It was to a place we’d already been, with no agenda. We walked a lot, ate meals slowly, and slept more than we ever did on our pre-baby trips. It wasn’t a grand adventure. But it taught me that I could still be spontaneous, just in a different rhythm. That was more valuable than any bucket-list destination.
Third, talk about what you’d be giving up by waiting, not just what you’d be gaining. If you wait a year, that’s a year you won’t have with a child. That doesn’t mean the child would be better or worse—it means there’s no neutral choice. You’re always trading something. Naming the trade helps you stop spinning in circles. We eventually said, “We can have another beach trip, or we can have another year of being a family of three.” We chose the family. It wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was a Tuesday.
For families who already have kids, this question often comes up in a different form: should we try for another before we take one more family vacation? That one is less about whether you’re ready and more about spacing. From a practical standpoint, the difference between one kid and two is bigger than many people expect. If you want a few years of travel with your current child before adding another, that’s a valid reason to wait. But it’s still a guess. Nobody can promise you a child will sleep on a plane or handle a delayed flight. You just adjust.
There’s also something to be said for remembering what travel is actually like. I’m not saying you should picture a screaming baby in a rental car—that’s a cartoon version. I mean remember the less-photographed parts: the layovers, the sunburns, the hotel pillows that feel like bricks. Some people love those parts because they’re evidence of being somewhere. If you’re wired that way, you’ll find a way to keep traveling with kids, and the vacations you take before pregnancy are simply pre-game.
Our daughter is three now. We’ve taken her on a handful of trips, including one to the beach where she spent an hour throwing sand into the ocean and was the happiest I’ve ever seen her. We have not made it to Patagonia. I’m not sure we will for a few more years, and that’s okay. The list didn’t disappear—it just moved down the page.
If someone asked me today whether to wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations, I’d say this: take the vacations if you can, but don’t make them the reason. You can always book another flight. You can’t always book another year. That sounds like a slogan, but it’s the truth we landed on after months of going back and forth.
We never did book that extra trip. I still sometimes think about Lisbon, especially in winter. But now I think about showing my daughter the narrow streets and watching her see the ocean from the top of a hill for the first time. It won’t be the same as that quiet morning when we had nowhere to be and nobody to answer to. It will be louder, messier, and probably involve a meltdown over a missing sticker book. And still, I’d rather do that than wait around for the perfect time that was never going to arrive.
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