Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? What We Learned
Last spring, my sister-in-law called me from the parking lot of an REI, which is the kind of place you call when you’re about to spend three hundred dollars on a tent and need someone to talk you out of it. We talked about rain flies and campsite reservations for a minute, and then she said, “Okay, serious question. We have two big trips this year—one in June, one in September. Do we wait to get pregnant until after?”
I laughed, because I recognized the question. It was the same one I’d asked myself years earlier, sitting on the edge of a hotel bathtub in Lisbon, staring at a pregnancy test that had just turned pink. My husband and I had booked that trip months before. We had talked about “maybe trying soon,” but we also had plans. We were supposed to fly to the Azores in October. We had a hiking itinerary, a refundable car rental, and a list of small vineyards I wanted to visit.
And then, there was the test.
My first thought wasn’t “we’re pregnant.” It was “what about the Azores?” I felt guilty about that almost immediately. Shouldn’t I be thinking about something bigger? But the trip was real and concrete, and the pregnancy was abstract. I remember sitting there and calculating: If I was pregnant now, how far along would I be in October? What would that mean for the hikes? For the wine? For the eight-hour flight?
We decided to go anyway. I called my doctor, who said flying was fine. I switched our trail mileage to flatter routes. I read about sea bands and ginger chews. We packed a bag of saltines and electrolyte powder, which felt ridiculous for a couple of people who had planned a dream vacation. But we went, and it wasn’t the trip we had pictured. I was tired by midafternoon. I napped in the rental car more than once. I ate bread and cheese while my husband drank the local wine alone, which turned out to be fine. He didn’t care. I was glad I was there. But I also remember thinking, somewhere between a volcanic crater and a tiny harbor town, that it would have been okay to wait.
The second time, we did wait. We had two vacations booked—one for a friend’s wedding in Mexico, another for a week in the mountains with a group of families. We looked at each other, looked at the calendar, and made a decision. We wanted to scuba dive. We wanted to stay up late. We wanted to hike without carrying a diaper bag. We wanted to be able to say “yes” to the kind of spontaneous plans that you can’t make when you’re about to have a newborn. So we waited.
And honestly? That was a different kind of loss. I remember sitting on a plane a year later, holding our second baby, flying to a much less exotic destination, wondering why we had been so careful about the timing. We had saved for those vacations. We had built them up in our heads. And then they came and went, and then we got pregnant anyway, and life rearranged itself just as thoroughly as it had the first time. The trips didn’t make us more ready. They just made us feel like we had done everything “right” before the chaos started.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me, in both of those moments: there isn’t a wrong answer, but there is a wrong question. The question shouldn’t be “will we regret it?” because you will regret something either way. You’ll regret not going when you were pregnant and the beds were uncomfortable. You’ll regret waiting and then wishing you hadn’t spent all your savings before the baby came. Regret isn’t really the point.
The better question is something like: what is this vacation actually for?
If the trip is a once-in-a-lifetime bucket list thing—a pilgrimage, a trek, a honeymoon that kept getting delayed—then wait. Not because pregnancy ruins travel, but because that particular trip is about a kind of freedom and physical ease that will be different after kids. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that. It doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you honest.
But if the trip is just a trip? If it’s a week at the beach with cousins, a city break you booked because the flights were cheap, a wedding you’re not really excited about? Then don’t wait. The pregnancy will change how you do it, but it won’t ruin it. You’ll sit more. You’ll leave dinner early. You’ll see a lot of hotel rooms at 9 p.m. But you’ll also have this strange little secret in your pocket, and there’s something nice about that.
There’s a practical version of this too, and it involves less philosophy. If you’re thinking about waiting, ask yourself what you’d actually do on the trip. Write it down. Not “relax” or “have fun”—I mean the specifics. If the list is full of things you can only do while not pregnant, then that’s your answer. But if the list is mostly “sit in a café” and “walk around an old town” and “look at the ocean,” pregnancy isn’t the obstacle. The real obstacle is the fever dream of a perfect, spontaneous, childless trip that probably wasn’t going to happen anyway.
I think about this as a parent but also as someone who spent years around classrooms. Parents do the same thing with kids and school. They wait to enroll their child until they’re sure the kid is “ready.” They hold them back a year, or they delay kindergarten, because they’re afraid of the timing being wrong. Sometimes that’s helpful. But a lot of the time, the child would have been fine either way. Readiness isn’t a fixed point. It’s a moving target. You make the call with the information you have, and then you adapt.
That’s true for vacations, too. There is no magic window. There’s no week when the ocean will be calm, your body will be comfortable, and your bank account will be full. There’s just the trip you take and the life you make when you get back.
My sister-in-law, after a long silence on the REI parking lot, said, “That didn’t really answer my question.” And she was right. I told her to call me after she looked at a refundable flight policy, and to ask herself what she’d do if the trip wasn’t perfect. Then I told her that either way, she’d end up with a story to tell.
She got pregnant before the June trip. They still went, mostly because the Airbnb was nonrefundable. She sent me a photo of her husband parasailing while she sat on the balcony with a lemonade, reading a paperback. She looked happy. Not triumphant. Just happy. I thought about the Azores, and the mountains we waited for, and I realized that’s probably the most you can hope for. Not the right timing. Just a balcony where you’re okay with not being in the water yet.
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