In Retrospect, This Could Have Been Avoided

Have you ever had one of those days, where everything went from totally perfect to perfectly horrible all of a sudden, and you thought, "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?????" And you shook your fist at the heavens and cursed and moaned and whined and cried? For example, if your house was beautifully, sparklingly clean (Thanks Rosa!) and then before you knew it, your white couch was covered in mud?

Why oh why oh why? The horror, etc.

Faced with the muddy couch and the muddy footprints, and the muddy dog, I decided to hose off the dog and then take her on a walk around the block to air dry. While we were walking, I had the following thoughts.

1.) A muddy couch is the worst thing in my life right now. I am very lucky.
2.) In retrospect, there are things I could have done to avoid this.

Read, learn, and avoid this same fate.

1.) When your 2 year old wants to water your garden, consider supervising.
This one is pretty self explanatory, but somewhat hard to follow advice. I mean, what if you are trying to cook dinner? It seemed like letting Jack water the strawberries would keep him out of my hair and out of trouble for 5 minutes. I was half right.
2.) When your 2 year old shows up at the back door, drenched, saying, "MOMMA! I got wet", consider investigating the cause.
If your first instinct is to get them out of wet clothes and into pajamas because dinner is almost ready, make a mental note to go back soon and figure out what happened. Or at least turn off the hose. In our case, Jack had partially unscrewed the nozzle from the hose. He got soaked, and dropped the hose on the ground and ran to the door. I just figured he squirted himself in the face, and didn't investigate any further.
3.) When you are eating your dinner on the patio, and you hear the puppy whine in a certain way that makes you think, "I should see what is going on" then, really, see what is going on.
Really, I can't emphasize this one enough. The hose was just creating a lake in the yard, that Lucy was turning into a mud puddle by digging and digging. And then she was running into the house, getting on the couch and running back out. And so on. I definitely thought something was going on, but I didn't look into it. Although it probably would have just ruined my dinner.