Your status will not help you with international business class award availability, so there is no consideration there. I can see there is a benefit to traveling before your child turns 2 and I would challenge the notion that those tickets are already gone. On DL, availability actually tends to be quite scarce far out in advance and tends to open in the months leading up to the flight. It is certainly not too late to start looking for tickets for summer 2012. You may also wish to read up on how to find availability on partner airlines (there is lots of good information on these forums) as Delta.com will not return results for many partners.