Alia and her daughter

We are staying in an apartment which gets cleaned by a lady twice a week. After a few days of being here, and with piles of ironing literally taking over the house (like a kind of monster plague from Dr Who), I managed to ask the cleaning lady if she would stay on for a couple of hours and do the ironing when she finished. She agreed, and the first day, stayed for four hours and finished all my ironing for me which was a legendary help. 

Anyway, she wasn't scared off, has continued to come and we are getting into a reasonable routine. 

Last Tuesday during my Russian lesson, she asked the Mighty Alla (my Russian teacher who is truly mighty) if I was looking for some help, since I seemed to be doing everything without a nanny and she might have a friend etc and I said that I was indeed looking for some help, listed everything I needed doing and asked her if "her friend" might be interested. It turns out she wants to work, and also has a daughter who is looking for work as well, the idea being that they can kind of share the work between them, including evening babysitting. 

So today she has arrived with her daughter Goolia (Julia) who looks alright and has a one-year-old boy and a four-year-old daughter. They are doing their best to communicate with me, and Allia played with a whinging Connie for the whole of my Russian lesson which was much better than last week when Connnie sat on my lap and ate my paper for most of the lesson. I am also doing my utmost to communicate with them, but I am sure there is a LOT being lost in translation, so on Thursday I need to get husband and possibly an interpreter to come and make sure that everyone understands everything and all parties are happy. 

We really can barely communicate and had an excruciating late afternoon. She was still here when I got back from school with the kids, when I thought she would have gone home. And I was beginning to think I would quite like her to go away now, but I couldn't tell her that she had finished. So we resorted to the dictionary: "Today. Finish. Thank you very much." I said. She then grabbed the dictionary and after an extraordinary length of time said "Sank you", garbled a bit more Russian at me which I took to mean that it would obviously get easier than this with time, and left. I think she is coming back tomorrow morning at 10am but I am not sure! 

Having not really had any nanny help since June, Connie's nose is well out of joint not being looked after by Mummy for 40 minutes, but this Mummy is more than ready to leave her in someone else's capable hands for a few hours! 

And so tonight it seems we have hired a nanny.