My husband and I have two kids, ages 3 and 1.5. I use my bike for a lot of errands and currently use a road bike pulling a Burley trailer.
It's looking like in the next couple of weeks we may be taking three foster-to-adopt kids, ages 1.5, 2, and 3. Yeah, life will be busy for a while.
We're trying to figure out a way for me to continue biking with five kids under age four, and I thought maybe some people on here could come up with ideas.
We've looked at bakfiets, but besides being really expensive, they generally only seat four - so in theory I could use one of those with a child seat on the back, and I guess pull a trailer if I needed groceries - but that's a lot of weight to drive home (a long gradual uphill into the wind). I'm reluctant to use child seats that mount to the bike itself just because it always looks precarious to me, but if that's what had to be done I'd try to find a way to make it happen.
We've tried to find trailer options online, but can't find anything that would be big enough, so we've toyed with the idea of trying to build our own. The benefit of using a trailer rather than a bakfiets is that I've trained our dog to help pull the bike, but I don't think I could safely control him with a bakfiets, since he'd be way out in front. But having him able to help pull the bike towing a heavyish trailer would actually be a way he could start earning his dog food. :-)
We found a YouTube video where someone had hooked two bike trailers together, but that leaves us short one seat.
Also, would a road bike be adequate for this task anyway? I'm sure a mountain bike would probably be better suited, but I don't currently have one of those. If the kids' average weight is 35 lbs, and there are five of them, that's 175 lbs, plus the weight of the trailer, plus whatever cargo (groceries would generally be the heaviest cargo).
So, any ideas?