I’m Rachel, a homeschooling mom of four, a former teacher, and I work from home. I taught full time through four pregnancies and four babies born in four years, including a son who arrived with gastroschisis and spent his first weeks in the NICU. I’m passionate about supporting moms, building strong communities, and finding practical ways to make everyday life a little easier, and when I’m not working or homeschooling you’ll probably find me cheering on my kids at a baseball game or a jiu-jitsu competition.
Wondering what having 4 under 4 is like? I did it for four years while teaching full time. My kids are eight, seven, five, and four now, and this is the honest version of what those years took and what they gave.
I was talking to a mom at church the other day when she asked me how far apart my youngest two are, and when I told her eighteen months, and then mentioned that my older two are only a year apart, she looked at me and said “HOLY COW, I never knew.” We stood there a while talking about how much easier it is to go places now that they’re older, and I ended up telling her the truth about the early years, which is that curbside pickup was holding our entire life together, because there were long stretches when I could not get four small people in and out of a store and did not have to.
That conversation is the whole post in one sentence, because having your kids close in age is really hard at first and it is so nice once they are older, and everything below is the long version of both halves of that.
When I was pregnant with my fourth, the reaction was always the same, a pause and then a blink and then the question: “Wow. You’re going to have four under four?”
I’d spend all day pouring into other people’s children and then come home to four of my own, all under four years old, one of them a NICU baby who couldn’t keep food down, and I did that for four years straight. My kids are eight, seven, five, and four now, and I can finally say it plainly: those were the hardest four years of my life. Not hard in the way that a rough season is hard, but hard in the way that means I still don’t fully understand how I did it, and I only felt the real weight of it once it was over.
Stage One: 2 Under 2
Everyone warns you about the newborn stage, and nobody tells you that going from one child to two is the biggest identity shift of the whole thing. With one baby you can still be a person who happens to have a baby, but with 2 under 2 that math stops working, because there are two of them and one of you, they both need you right now, and one of them cannot be reasoned with because he is just shy of a year old. And then maternity leave ends and you go back to work.
What I remember about my first day back in the classroom is crying, and that’s the whole memory, not the lesson plan or the students or what I wore. Just crying.
The toddler regressed, I couldn’t put anyone down, leaving the house took forty five minutes and I still had to arrive on time, and the stretch from four to seven in the evening was pure survival with planning and grading still waiting after bedtime.
Three things got me through that year: a carrier I could wear for hours, a gated space where I could set someone down and know they’d be fine for four minutes, and a bar lowered so far that it was essentially on the floor. I also stopped qualifying the help I was offered, because saying “oh, you don’t have to” was costing me hours I didn’t have to spare.
If you’re in 2 under 2 right now, I want you to know that this is the hardest part, and not because the kids themselves are hardest, but because you’re still becoming the person who can do this.
Stage Two: 3 Under 3
Two adults and two kids is man to man defense, three kids is zone, and on some mornings I was solo and simply outnumbered. I stopped trying to give each child my full attention and started managing a group instead, which felt like failure at the time and wasn’t, because managing a group is the actual skill that the job requires, at home and in a classroom both.
Logistics got harder in every direction, from car seats and doorways to daycare drop-offs and a school schedule that doesn’t care what your morning looked like, and illness got harder too, because one virus moved through the house for three straight weeks and teachers can’t simply not show up. The guilt got harder than either of those, because my oldest was still a baby and was getting so much less of me than he’d had before.
Then something surprised me, which was that they started entertaining each other, not reliably and not for very long, but it happened, and it was the first daylight I’d seen.
Stage Three: Having 4 Under 4
Going from three to four was the easiest transition of the three. Not easy. Easier.
By then I had no illusions left and my old life was long gone, so there was nothing to mourn, and I already had the gear and the low standards, which meant the fourth simply joined a system that was already running.
Bringing her home to a house with three little boys in it was the absolute best thing, and she was a girl after three boys, which I had said out loud I was hoping for even though I’d loved every minute of being a boy mom. When we found out, I cried, because there’s something about getting that news on your fourth, when you already know it’s your last, that lands differently than it would have the first time around.
The hard parts were real, because someone was always touching me and the noise never stopped, and going out in public turned into a spectacle where strangers counted my children and commented on them, and when one of them told me I sure did have my hands full, all I could think was that yes, I certainly did. Worst of all there was no margin anywhere in the system, so one sick kid or one bad night or one canceled sitter would knock the whole thing over. What was better than I expected is that they always had someone to play with and are now forming the best friendships that I know will last a lifetime.
The Part Nobody Talks About: The Anxiety of Leaving the House
I could handle the house, and what I dreaded was the door. Every single outing came with a low hum of anxiety that started before I’d even got the shoes on, and it was never really about the logistics, it was the running list of what-ifs: what if I run out of diapers, what if someone has an accident and I don’t have a change of clothes, what if my oldest melts down at the park while the younger two need to be held.
That last one was the real fear, because I wasn’t afraid that something would go wrong, I was afraid that everything would need me at once and I would have to choose, and I spent a lot of time rehearsing the moment I’d have to set a crying baby down in order to go get a screaming toddler, in public, with people watching. Some days that fear won and we simply stayed home.
What helped was a bag that lived in the car permanently stocked and restocked every Sunday night, so that leaving never required a decision from me, and lowering the goal until the win was that we left the house rather than that we had a nice time. We went to the same few places, I picked parks with a fence around them whenever I could, and I had to accept that I would sometimes need to put a baby down, because nobody was harmed by crying for ninety seconds while I handled the bigger emergency.
Doing All of This While Teaching Full Time
This is the part I don’t think people saw. Teaching isn’t a job you can coast through on four hours of sleep, because it’s emotionally output-heavy from the first bell, and you spend the whole day regulating a room full of other people’s children and being patient on demand and being on, and then the day ends and you drive home to four more who get whatever is left of you.
And then there was PTO, which I never once spent on myself in four years, because every hour I had went to somebody else’s fever, or to a daycare calling at ten in the morning, or to a stomach bug working its way through four small people one at a time so that a single virus cost me three separate days. I’d burn through the whole year’s days by a few months in.
Nursing and pumping were their own full job stacked on top of the other two, because a school day does not bend around a pumping schedule and I spent years hunting for fifteen minutes and a door that locked, then carrying milk around a building and worrying the entire time about whether it was staying cold enough. By my fourth I had a Ceres Chill, which made all of that enormously easier, but the real lesson underneath it was that I needed an actual system rather than good intentions, because every ounce I lost to a warm bag or a forgotten cooler was an ounce I had gotten up in the night to make.
Full disclosure, I work for Ceres Chill now. I was a customer first, back when my fourth was a baby, and that is how I ended up there.
The hardest stretch of all of it was my third, who was born with gastroschisis and was in the NICU while I was still somebody’s employee with a calendar and a class roster, and I split myself in half during those weeks and neither half was doing well, which turned into a story of its own that I told in full in my journey with a NICU baby.
The drop-off
Here’s the one thing that never got easier. Every morning I dropped my own babies off at daycare so that I could drive to a building full of other people’s children and take care of them instead, and I’d hand over the baby and buckle back into an empty-sounding car and carry that around all day like a hole in my chest, a missing piece I never quite set down. I know it’s a trade that a lot of mothers make, and knowing that didn’t help at all.
Going back after each leave never got easier either, not once, and I cried every single time, four babies and four returns and four drives to work with my face still wet, and the whole time I kept waiting for the version of me who would handle it better by the third or fourth round, and she never showed up. Everything you read tells you that the first week is hard and then you adjust, and I want to be honest with you here, because I didn’t adjust, I just kept going anyway, and those are two different things that we should probably stop pretending are the same.
Dinner in those years was chaos and Chipotle, because it is not possible to cook with three or four little ones who all need you, so my husband did a lot of the cooking and we ate a lot of takeout and I have made my peace with every bit of that. People also kept telling me to get up before the kids, and I’d like to say clearly that you cannot wake up early when you haven’t slept properly in years, and that it isn’t a discipline problem.
The feeling underneath all of it
I spent four years certain that I was failing at both jobs, never a good enough mom because I was gone all day and exhausted by the time I got home, and never a good enough teacher because I was running in late with spit-up on my shoulder and nothing left to give by sixth period. What I understand now, five years out, is that there was no version of those years in which I was going to feel like enough, so the feeling was never information about my performance, it was simply what that much output feels like from the inside, and if that’s where you are right now, the guilt isn’t evidence of anything, it’s a symptom.
How We Actually Slept: Four Kids, Four Different Setups
Our sleep setup changed with every baby and never once looked like the version in the books, because with 2 under 2 we co-slept with both of them in our bed, and when my third was born the older two moved into a bed together rather than into separate rooms, which went far more smoothly than moving either of them out alone would have.
My third was a NICU baby born with gastroschisis, a rare abdominal wall defect where the intestines develop outside the body and have to be surgically placed back in, and he threw up constantly afterward, so he slept on a towel between me and my husband until he was about one. There was no sleep training and there was no plan, there was a towel and a baby who needed to be within arm’s reach and the two of us.
Looking back the pattern is obvious, because each new baby stayed close to us while the older kids consolidated, and nobody was ever moved out alone, they were only ever moved toward a sibling, which is why none of those transitions were traumatic and why I would do it exactly the same way again.
A note: this is what worked for our family and it isn’t medical advice, because bedsharing carries real risks and the safest setup depends on your baby and your bed and your circumstances. The American Academy of Pediatrics publishes safe sleep guidance for parents, so read it and decide for yourself.
What It Looks Like Now
They’re eight, seven, five, and four now, and here’s the part I could not have imagined from inside those years: I’m home with them. I work from home and I homeschool all four with my family helping, and the thing I grieved every single morning in that car, leaving my own children in order to go care for someone else’s, is simply not my life anymore, which means I get the days I used to cry about.
My gastroschisis baby is doing great and he’s five years old now. If you found this post because you’re pregnant with a diagnosis and terrified, or because you’re sitting in a NICU right now next to a baby with a silo, please read that sentence twice, because the baby who slept on a towel between us since he couldn’t keep anything down is a healthy, ordinary, loud five-year-old boy, and his full NICU story is here.
I had a moment the other day walking out of a 7-Eleven with all four of them in tow and everybody holding a Slurpee, and it struck me that somewhere along the way this had gotten easier without my ever noticing the day it happened, and it was just an ordinary afternoon when you realize you walked into a store with four children and walked back out again without bracing for a single part of it. And a PRO TIP while I am here, because with four kids you learn to count these things very carefully: 7-Eleven is one of the cheapest places anywhere to buy four fun drinks at once.
Saturday mornings are kolaches and rest and that is the entire plan, and after four years of Saturdays spent catching up on everything I couldn’t do during the week, a slow morning still feels like something I got away with.
And they have each other, which matters more than any of the rest of it, because the very spacing that made those years so heavy is the same thing that gave them a shared childhood in real time, the same stages and the same games and the same memories, since they weren’t siblings taking turns at being little, they were little together. If we could afford it I’d have more, and I want that on the record right here, after all the honesty about how hard it was, because they won’t remember me being exhausted, they’ll remember that there was always someone there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is having 4 under 4 harder than 3 under 3?
No. For me the jump from one child to two was the hardest of all, because that is the point where your entire life has to reorganize itself, and by the time the fourth arrived each new baby simply added work rather than a whole new way of living.
Does having 4 under 4 get easier?
Yes, and sooner than you expect. The physically relentless part ended around the time my youngest turned three, and while those years were genuinely hard they were also genuinely finite.
How do you work full time with four kids under four?
Badly on some days, and with a great deal of help. In our case that meant daycare for all of them and a husband who took two kids every morning while I took the other two, and what I dropped in order to manage it was being an A+ teacher for a few years, which I would drop again.
How do you pump at work as a teacher?
With a lot of planning and very little privacy. The schedule does not bend for you, so what saved me was a system for keeping milk cold and a container I trusted rather than hoping a bag and an ice pack would hold until the last bell.
Do you regret having kids so close together?
Not for a second. If we could afford it I’d have more, because it was simultaneously the hardest four years of my life and a stretch of time I would choose again tomorrow, and both of those things are true at once.
Are your kids close now that they’re older?
Very much so. Close spacing doesn’t guarantee closeness, but it does mean they grew up in the same stage at the same time, and in our house that made it stick.
What’s the hardest age gap?
The two year gap, at least for me. A one year gap was almost easy, because you still have two babies and the older one is too little to get jealous and hasn’t had enough time to learn how to be clingy, but at two years apart they are close enough to get along and not quite close enough to do EVERYTHING together, and that in between space is where it got hard.