Soon after their marriage, Leah began having children. She had four sons all in a row, and she named them Reuven, Shimon, Levi, and Yehudah.
Meanwhile, Rachel had no children at all, which made her very unhappy. Rachel remembered that when Sarah was childless, she gave her maidservant, Hagar, to Avraham to marry - and then Sarah was blessed with children! So Rachel asked Yaakov to marry her maidservant, Bilhah. She figured that perhaps then HaShem would answer her prayers and give her the children she longed for. Yaakov did marry Bilhah, and she gave birth to two sons, Dan and Naftali.
Leah also gave her maidservant, Zilpah, to Yaakov as a wife and Zilpah gave birth to two sons, named Gad and Asher.
After that, Leah had more children-two sons, named Yissachar and Zevulun, and finally, a daughter named Dinah.
Still - Rachel had no child! How much longer could she possibly wait, while everyone else already had children to be proud of? Rachel and Yaakov both prayed and prayed to HaShem to bless her with a child... and finally, after so many years of waiting, she had a son! She was a mother at last! She named her son Yosef. (Later, she would have a second son, Binyamin.)
By now Yaakov had quite a large family: four wives, eleven sons, and one daughter. He had established his family in Charan - but they would soon be moving on.
