Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Few More Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
We were three days into our beach week when my friend Dana brought it up. The kids were building a lopsided sandcastle a few meters away, bickering over a broken plastic shovel, and Dana and I were sitting in the shade with coffee that had gone lukewarm. She’d never been the kind of person to ask for parenting advice, so when she said, “Can I ask you something weird?” I actually put my cup down to give her my full attention.
“My husband and I are ready to try for a baby,” she said. “But we keep talking ourselves out of it because we want to take a couple more vacations first. Just the two of us. Is that a stupid reason to wait?”
I knew exactly what she was asking, because I’d been sitting in her chair eight years earlier.
My husband and I got married in late June. We both had decent jobs with okay vacation time, and we kept a shared note in our phones listing places we wanted to see. We’d talked about kids before we walked down the aisle, but the timeline always included “a year or two of just us first.” Then that year passed pretty quickly, and we found ourselves comparing flight prices to thinking about ovulation schedules. We told ourselves we just wanted to knock out a few more destinations before our lives got smaller.
So we took two trips. The first was a week in a rented cottage with no wifi and a toilet that made strange noises all night. The second was a four-day city break where we did almost nothing except walk around, eat long dinners, and sleep past nine. Both trips were wonderful. But looking back, I can see that we didn’t really need the trips to feel close to each other. We needed them to feel like we’d been given permission to feel close.
When I tell people we don’t regret waiting those extra months, I try to be precise about why. It wasn’t because the vacations were essential. It was because we stopped treating the pregnancy as a deadline. The moment we let go of the idea that a baby would end something—our freedom, our energy, our ability to be spontaneous—we stopped looking at the calendar with one eye closed. The conversations we had during those trips mattered more than the destinations. We talked about what we were afraid of, and for the first time we did it without our phones in our hands.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that having a baby is just like gaining a travel companion who happens to cry a lot. The first year is hard in a way that surprised me even though I’d heard it a hundred times. We didn’t fly anywhere for nine months after our son was born, and when we finally did, we brought half the nursery. We packed diapers, a travel crib, a sound machine, a white noise app backup, and a breast pump that took up more space than my own clothes. The flight was a blur of pacifiers and apologetic smiles. The trip itself was equal parts fun and exhausting, and I had to nurse in the back seat of our rental car more times than I can count.
But we went. And then we went again the next year, to a beach house with my parents, where my mother watched the baby for four hours each morning so we could sleep in shifts. It wasn’t a couples retreat, but it was a reminder that we could still take trips if we were willing to modify the definition of “trip.”
I think about Dana’s question a lot now, partly because I’ve had variations of the same conversation with coworkers and friends over the years. And I’ve noticed that the people who ask it aren’t really asking about vacations. They’re asking about control. Pregnancy and parenthood come with so much unpredictability that the idea of planning a few more comfortable, known trips becomes a way to hold onto the illusion that life is manageable. I get that. I truly do.
But here’s what nobody told me: taking the vacations doesn’t actually give you back control. It just buys you time. At some point, you will either try to get pregnant or you won’t, and no number of sunsets on a beach will make that decision feel fully finished.
That’s not to say there aren’t practical reasons to wait. There absolutely are. If you’ve got savings goals, a job transition, or a major move on the horizon, it makes sense to get those out of the way first. And if you’re planning a destination wedding or an anniversary trip you’ve been dreaming about for years, go. Go and don’t feel guilty about it. The calendar is worth paying attention to as well—fertility doesn’t pause for anyone’s bucket list, and age and health factors matter more than we like to admit. But if the only thing holding you back is a vague feeling that you should “have fun first,” it’s worth asking whether that feeling is really about the trips.
I also learned, after my second pregnancy, that there’s a narrow window for travel while pregnant that nobody warns you about. The first trimester can bring exhaustion and nausea that make a six-hour flight feel like a marathon. The third trimester is physically heavy and most airlines won’t let you fly past a certain point. The second trimester is often the sweet spot, which means if you do decide to wait a few months, you might end up going on one of those “last vacations” while pregnant anyway. That’s what happened to a woman in my prenatal yoga class. She and her husband went all out on a two-week trip to Portugal, she was five months along, and she said the best part was that she had an excuse to nap every afternoon.
When I first got pregnant after our two trips, I remember feeling surprised that the vacations didn’t make me feel more ready. We came home, unpacked, and looked at each other as if we’d forgotten to buy the one thing we’d gone shopping for. But now I understand that readiness isn’t a feeling you arrive at. It’s something you recognize in hindsight, after you’ve stumbled through a few sleepless nights and realized you can survive them.
If Dana were to ask me again today, I’d tell her the same thing I eventually said to her on that beach. Take the trips if you want to take them. But make them count for more than just photos on your phone. Talk about what you’re scared of. Ask each other what kind of parents you want to be, and what kind of partners you want to remain. Use the long dinners to say the things you’ve been meaning to say out loud. And when you come home, if you’re still not sure whether it’s time, that’s okay too. Sometimes waiting has less to do with logistics and more to do with listening to your own hesitations.
We took our vacations, we came home, and we got pregnant. It wasn’t a magic formula, and it didn’t make us feel ready. But it did give us a shared history to look back on when the nights were long. When our son was six weeks old, I remember looking at my husband and saying, “Remember that little cottage with the bad plumbing?” And we laughed. That was enough.
Dana texted me a few weeks after our beach conversation. She and her husband decided to skip the extra trips and start trying that fall. Instead, they booked a long weekend in a town an hour from their place, nothing fancy. She said they spent most of it walking through a botanical garden and talking about the kind of parents they wanted to be. When she told me, I smiled. I think she figured out what it took me two vacations to learn.
I still don’t know if there’s a universal answer to her question. I suspect there isn’t. But I do know that whether you wait or don’t wait, it’s the hard conversations that prepare you—not the packing lists.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Few More Vacations