When to Take a Trip with Your Baby

We discovered that there are several ideal times to take a trip. After all, you can spontaneously take a trip, but with work, juggling a baby and the house, and other things on the calendar, travel when you have a baby will rarely happen without planning.

In this section, figure out when to take the trip with your infant. We’ll help you through some default scenarios and then some situations you may not have considered, for taking trips with your little one!

During parental leave

A lot of parents take their parental leave in the first 1-3 months of a baby’s life. This can be a HARD time to travel, as first-time parents are navigating the world of having a baby. Throw in the curveball of being away from your bassinet, your kitchen and your family, and there’s a lot to mull over. You’ll first have to read a guide like Are you ready to travel? to decide.

During parental leave and with a newborn, there is a lot of exhaustion, especially for breastfeeding mothers and the partners figuring out how to support them. This is what we experienced, on top of postpartum survival and recovery, which varies for every woman.

What happened to be the best thing about Dan’s parental leave was that he took 1 month when our baby was born, and then took the rest of his leave during summer, six months later. Wow—we didn’t know how cool this would be for our travel lives.

We spent summer taking multi-day trips in our area to hiking areas on multiple occasions, and stayed overnight, as our first travels with a baby at 5, 6 and 7 months. It was great to be able to spend both of our parental leaves with this type of freedom to travel, after the newborn phase. We recommend it, if you have the leave time!

Around holidays

We have lots of friends who would travel on the cusp of, and during, holiday weekends, and they still do this with their baby! They both did not get a lot of parental leave from their jobs, so maximizing travel during holiday weekends when there is one “free” holiday day on which to be away from home, was right for them.

They’re always traveling with their baby around Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the new year, it’s MLK Day, Presidents’ Day Weekend and Good Friday.

If your time off from work is limited, consider taking a holiday weekend trip with your baby. Further, my general tip is to fly or drive out a few days before the holiday weekend ensues, and return a few days after (if you have the time), to avoid congestion at airports and lots of traffic on the road (it’s just tougher with a baby!). This is also one of my best hacks for finding affordable family flights.

Regular PTO that you have from work

PTO = Paid Time Off, and most of us have it from our jobs.

This one is easy: you can take time off from work to travel with your baby. Remember: trips can be long weekends (weekend + 1 business day), or sometimes, up to two weeks!

It all depends on your threshold for taking time off from work as well as your preference of how long to be traveling with the baby. We tend to align “how far the trip is” with “how much time we have.” With more time, we travel farther from home.

When finances permit

Of course, we’re talking about real life here: traveling costs money! There are budget-friendly ways to take trips, like visiting family and friends and getting to stay with them (if they have the space, which gets harder with a baby!), of course.

But if you want to go further, or away for longer, money becomes an important factor.

We spent our baby’s second summer barely traveling—we had just bought our house, we were doing renovations, doing various home improvement projects and getting used to having a mortgage. We were entitled to a break from traveling, and we spent time locally at playgrounds, hikes and day trips.

When we got things together and pulled the trigger on a trip after all the house work was done, it was to a lower-cost-of-travel destination where our US Dollar went far: Mexico City. And as it turned out, Mexico City with a baby was an amazing choice.

If your finances feel strained, remember: there may be a better time to travel with your baby in the future. Babies cost quite a bit of money, after diapers, formula, childcare, baby furniture, toys and clothes. There is no shame in staying put for a while and saving up for a trip that’ll be grand.

When you can travel for longer

We both banked our time wisely and realized that we could travel in low season (February) when our baby was a bit over 12 months. We thought, if we have the time, what about taking a two-week trip? We hadn’t done that since before I had gotten pregnant, and it seemed very special.

Taking a long trip was a big adventure. We learned a lot about being responsible for our baby, without any childcare help, for that long period of time!

For parents who work remotely, or who work flexible jobs and can take several weeks or months off, taking a longer trip can be a very unique time to explore and have adventures with a baby. It’s also what a lot of people would call, “the type of time you’ll never get back,” and I think that’s true: your child will never be as small as they are now, and a trip during which they are “portable” and young is something to do now.

When you just need a break!

We both have the travel itch, and maybe you do, too. If we haven’t taken a trip in a while, either because we don’t want to “miss out” on the childcare we pay for every month or we’re out of ideas, we start looking for cool trips to take with our baby.

Then, we make it happen.

If you think you’re going to need a break, look for times in the ideas above, of when to take a trip with your baby. It could be a holiday weekend, or additional periods of parental leave, or simply when the stars align and make it possible. Some of the simplest trips to book are those on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts if you just want to “book something” and go!