Juggling in the land of stan

So the Allia boozing disaster was finalized and that left me with no nanny. This, in itself, is not such a problem since I am not holding down a full time job, or anything like that. But when you have people to help out you can make plans in advance without considering that you might have to sack them out of the blue for being a vodka snaffler, and  we were expecting my parents to arrive on Saturday night from the UK, followed by an early morning flight with myself and the baby to Uzbekistan on Monday morning. 

I had planned to leave the two other children under the supervision of the nanny and the driver, who would pick them up from school, feed them, put them to bed and then wait for my unreliable husband to return from work (which could be any time from 7pm to 1am depending on his work load). 

So a series of frantic phone calls later, I had called in numerous favours from friends, and had a complicated plan for the week ahead with tea being provided in five different houses, driver primed to pick up kids, take them here and there, go and get stand in babysitter (Rosa, another gold-toothed Kazakh lady who has baby sat for us on weekends before) who would come home, help them bathe then husband would arrive home and she could go home. It was slightly risky, but if noone forgot that they had said they would feed them, then I figured it would probably work out OK. 

And actually, it did.