Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Those Vacations? What We Figured Out on the Beach
The security line was backed up past the moving walkway, and the woman in front of me was holding a toddler on one hip while a baby in a stroller screamed. Her husband was trying to repack a carry-on that had unzipped. I remember thinking: That’s going to be us. Then I felt guilty for thinking it.
My husband and I were on our way to Cancun, just the two of us. Our daughter was four, finally out of diapers, finally sleeping through the night. We had made a plan: two vacations first. One as a couple, to remember what it felt like to be adults without a small child attached to us. One in June, a week at a beach house with our daughter, to give her one last trip as an only child. Then, after that, we would start trying for a second baby. It sounded perfectly reasonable.
The vacation itself was less reasonable. We had spent the weeks before it debating every detail. Should we tell our families we were trying? What if it took a long time? What if it happened immediately? Should we book the June trip assuming we’d be pregnant or not? By the time we landed in Cancun, we were so exhausted from the planning that we barely talked the first evening. My husband sat on the balcony scrolling through snorkeling tours, and I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.
At dinner, a young couple a few tables over was laughing about a botched kayaking trip. They looked unbothered. I pointed them out to my husband and said, “Remember when we were that relaxed?” He said, “We’re on vacation to relax before we start trying. But we’re not relaxed.” And that was the moment I knew we had the question backwards.
We had been treating the vacations as a finish line. Cross that line, and then we can get pregnant. But the line kept moving. There would always be a reason to wait: another trip, a work deadline, a season we wanted to enjoy with our daughter, a year we wanted to be more financially stable. And in the meantime, we were missing the actual point—which was that we weren’t using the vacation to rest. We were using it as a holding pattern.
My friend Dana, a first-grade teacher, once told me something I didn’t love hearing. “Kids don’t need perfect timing,” she said. “They need parents who are actually in the room. When parents are always waiting for the next stage, kids can feel that. They don’t know what it means, but they feel the restless energy.” At the time I thought that was harsh. But sitting in Cancun, I realized I had been waiting for our daughter to be easier, then waiting for our life to be easier, and now waiting for a vacation to be over so we could start making things harder. It didn’t make sense.
So we tried something. We sat down on the hotel balcony with a notepad and asked ourselves three questions. Not the big, scary questions about whether we were ready to have another child. Just practical ones.
First: What were these trips actually for? We had to be honest. The couple’s trip was supposed to be about sleeping in and having uninterrupted conversations. But we were using it to argue about imaginary future problems. So we made a silly rule: no family planning talk after six in the evening. If we needed to talk about it, we did it in the morning over coffee, with a twenty-minute limit. That sounds ridiculous, but it saved the trip. We went back to talking about the kind of things we used to talk about—books, music, whether it was weird that the resort had a statue of a dolphin holding a surfboard.
Second: If I got pregnant the very first month, would we cancel the June beach house trip? We realized the honest answer was no. We would still go. We would just pack differently and take more naps. So if we wouldn’t cancel it, there was no reason to wait for it before trying. The trip could happen whether or not I was pregnant.
Third: What was our daughter actually going to remember from a beach vacation? That one was harder. We wanted her to have a special memory before becoming a big sister. But she was four. She didn’t care about a nice rental house or a long drive along the coast. She cared about whether we were paying attention to her. So for the June trip, we let her pick three things. Not ten. Three. She picked “digging in the sand,” “ice cream that drips,” and “finding hermit crabs.” That became the entire itinerary. It was the best parenting decision we made all year.
I’m not saying every family should do exactly that. But there’s something about letting a child make small, real choices that helps them feel secure before a big change. It’s one of the few things you can actually do to smooth the road before a new sibling arrives. You can’t promise a four-year-old that the baby will be fun or that you’ll still have time for them. But you can say, “You picked the ice cream spot. We’re going to remember that. We’ll do that again when the baby comes.” It gives them a thread to hold on to.
We decided, eventually, not to wait for both vacations. After Cancun, we started trying. We kept the beach house trip on the calendar anyway. And then the strange thing happened: we didn’t get pregnant right away. By the time June came, I wasn’t pregnant. I was disappointed, but I was also so glad we had booked that trip. If we had waited for it, then started trying, we would have spent June feeling anxious about a future baby instead of being present with our daughter. Instead, we spent it doing exactly what she wanted.
She poured sand into a bucket for an hour and asked us to dump it out. She found a shell with a tiny hole and called it a “snail hotel.” She ate a drippy ice cream cone and cried when it fell, and then we bought her another one. Nothing special happened. There was no sunset that made us cry. But I remember sitting on a beach towel, watching my husband kneel beside her to show her something in the tide, and thinking: this is the thing I was worried about losing. But it doesn’t have to be lost. It just changes.
We still don’t know if or when a second child will come. That part is still uncertain. The snail hotel shell is still on our dresser, and every time I see it, I remember that we didn’t wait for the perfect time—we went, and we paid attention. The answer to “should I wait until after the vacations” isn’t a neat yes or no. For us, it was: keep the trips, keep the plans, and stop treating them as a gate you have to pass through first. The gate was already open. We just had to walk through it.
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