Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacation? What I Learned
Mara swirled the ice in her iced coffee while her three-year-old, Ellie, stacked sugar packets into a wobbly tower on the café table. We were sitting outside, and it was one of those perfect late-spring afternoons—the kind that makes you think everything should be decided in the sunlight.
“So, we have two trips booked,” she said, not looking at me. “One to the coast in September, and then a cabin trip with friends in January. And I keep thinking, if I get pregnant now, the coast is fine, but the cabin trip is right when I’d be huge. And then I think, maybe we should just wait. Have the vacations, then start trying.”
She finally looked up. “Am I overthinking this?”
I laughed, because I knew exactly where she was. My husband and I had spent a year doing the same math. We had a list: one more international trip, one more music festival, one more summer of sleeping in. We told ourselves we were waiting for the right moment. But when our son was born, none of those trips mattered as much as I thought they would.
And yet, I didn’t want to tell Mara to just forget her plans and get pregnant. That felt dismissive. The truth was more complicated.
I took a sip of my coffee and thought about how we finally made the decision.
It was during a long weekend trip to a small town after our friends all mysteriously had sudden childcare emergencies. We ended up with two extra days alone, eating mediocre pasta at a restaurant with paper placemats, and I remember saying, “I feel like we should be doing something more special. This is supposed to be our last big trip before we have a kid.”
My husband looked at me with a bit of tomato sauce on his chin. “Why? We’re together. We’re not doing anything else.”
And that was it.
I think we had been treating vacations like a final exam—something we had to pass before we were allowed to become parents. We wanted to have enough shared experiences, enough spontaneous adventures, enough lazy mornings in foreign cities, so that when the baby came, we wouldn’t feel like we missed out. But what I didn’t realize was that a vacation doesn’t build a relationship. It just shows you the relationship you already have.
That weekend, we didn’t do anything remarkable. We walked around, got lost, argued about which way to go, and then talked it through over gelato. We were tired, a little bored, and yet comfortable. It was that comfort, not the destination, that made me feel ready.
Mara’s daughter knocked over the sugar tower. Mara sighed and started picking up packets. “I know it’s not about the trips, exactly,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “But I feel like we’re finally in a good place. We’re not fighting as much. We’re communicating better.” She paused. “What if a baby messes that up?”
That question felt raw and honest. It’s the real one, underneath all the logistics.
So I told her what I tell every parent friend who asks: it will mess it up. And then you’ll rebuild it. But having some solid ground beforehand helps.
Here’s what I mean concretely. When my son was four weeks old, I was crying in the kitchen because the dishwasher was broken and I had washed three bottles by hand and couldn’t remember which nipple belonged to which ring. My husband came in and didn’t say “It’ll be okay.” He just took the bottle from me, finished the assembly, and then handed me a glass of water. We didn’t need to talk. We had been a team long enough that we knew each other’s roles.
That didn’t come from a vacation. It came from a thousand ordinary moments, some of them on trips, sure, but most of them in our own living room, ordering takeout and watching bad TV.
So if Mara and her husband really felt like they needed more time together, more trips, more couple time—I wouldn’t tell her to ignore that. But I would suggest she look at what she’s actually worried about. Is it the fear of missing out on a specific cabin trip? Or is it a sense that their relationship isn’t solid enough for a baby? Those are two different problems.
If it’s FOMO, I’d say this: you can still have a vacation with a baby. It’s just a different kind. You carry a diaper bag instead of a backpack. You leave dinner when the toddler has a meltdown. You spend a lot of time sitting on a hotel bed watching cartoons. But you also get to see your child’s face when they first touch sand. That’s not nothing.
If it’s the relationship, then waiting won’t fix it. Only working on the relationship will. And a vacation can actually be a good place to practice that—but not if you’re treating it as a last hurrah. Use it as a chance to notice how you handle stress, how you share space, how you recover from a missed train or a rainy day. That’s the real rehearsal for parenthood.
I leaned forward and said to Mara, “It sounds like you guys are in a good spot. That’s great. But a trip isn’t going to make you more ready. If anything, it might just make you realize you’re ready now.”
She was quiet. Ellie was now licking a sugar packet.
“But what if we get pregnant and then can’t go on the cabin trip?” she asked.
“Then you’ll be pregnant and stuck at home. Which is also fine. You’ll eat snacks and watch movies and complain about your back. And you’ll have a story about the trip that wasn’t. That has its own kind of charm.”
That made her laugh. And I remembered that when I was pregnant, we had to cancel a weekend getaway because I had terrible morning sickness. We stayed home instead. We watched four documentaries and he made me soup. It was awful and also wonderful, in a boring, ordinary way.
Maybe that’s the real test of parenthood. Not whether you can handle a beautiful sunset together, but whether you can handle a terrible, disappointing Tuesday and still be kind to each other.
I didn’t give Mara a clear answer. I don’t think there is one. She and her husband will decide based on their own timelines, their own fears, their own dreams. And honestly, either choice can work. Plenty of people take vacations first and then have kids. Plenty of people have kids and then take stroller-friendly beach trips. Nobody gets to do it all in the perfect order.
As we stood up to leave, Ellie grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the bakery across the street. Mara smiled and said, “I’ll let you know what we decide.” I squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll be here either way.”
Walking home, I thought about how the question of waiting isn’t really about vacations at all. It’s about whether you believe you can build the life you want with a child already in it. I still don’t know the answer for anyone else. But I know that after three years of parenting, my husband and I still occasionally dream about a trip to Japan. We haven’t booked it. Maybe we never will. And somewhere along the way, I stopped minding.
Because the best moments with him now don’t happen in scenic places. They happen at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday, when our son crawls into bed, and the three of us lie there, no plans, nowhere to go. It’s not a vacation. But it is a life.
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