First, you can check the balance of an address including unconfirmed transactions by passing 0 for the value of any minconf parameter in a balance-checking API. For example:
getmultibalances * * 0
Second, if your transactions are not being confirmed when you switch off a node, this will be because mining has stopped. The most likely reason is that you have given mining permission to multiple addresses, and the mining-requires-peers parameter is set to true in the blockchain parameters. So please try stopping MultiChain, then restarting multichaind with the extra parameter -miningrequirespeers=0.