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[honeybadger54]

My six year old niece challenged me to tick tac toe.

Me: Nana I’m not going to go easy on you.

Natalie: well I’m gonna go rough on you.

Me: Natalie do you know who proud Mary is?

Natalie: you.

[honeybadger54]

Our power goes out so we are trying not to open the fridge. 11yo looks for food in the pantry and looks very seriously at me before saying.

“A pantry is just a warm fridge.”

[honeybadger54]

Driving down the interstate…

John points at a billboard: Jesus is coming

Zoe: he’s taking his sweet ass time

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The fam talking about different heights.

John: My dads dad was 6’1” and Mimi’s dad was like 6’3”

Bella from the side hatch: now he’s negative 6’3”

It’s funny cause great grandpa wasn’t a great grandpa

[honeybadger54]

Sitting at dinner with the family when the 9 yo turns to her dad.

9yo: Do you have trust issues?

Dad: No, why?

9yo: I gotta figure out where I got this from.

[honeybadger54]

So my husband and I were singing along to ‘Some things never change’ from Frozen 2 and it gets to Elsa’s part...

Husband: Wtf Elsa why do you have to be different, you can’t follow the theme like everyone else?

Me straight faced: It’s cause she’s the bridge.

Husband: I want a divorce.

[honeybadger54]

So I’m cleaning the bathroom and my nine year old walks in and sits on the toilet seat and stares at me before sighing.

9yo: You know Donald, the president?

Me laughing on the bathroom floor: Donald Trump?

9yo: No, Kaitlin, the duck. (Insert child eye roll) Yes, the Donald president, well, I don’t care for him.

[honeybadger54]

So we were at my brother-in-laws house and my 4 year old niece hits my BIL in the chest cause he sat on her babydoll.

My husband: if you come at my brother like that again I’m gonna mess you up kid.

My niece, with one fist raised the other holding her baby: You want one of these?

[honeybadger54]

His favourite toy.

[honeybadger54]

Kids ask you for all these things for Christmas but then try to shut you down when you sing along to Frozen in the movie theater.

[honeybadger54]

Look at my pretty Boy

[honeybadger54]

Coming home from getting donuts my 9yo and I get out of the car and pass by our mean neighbors garden.

9 yo: Hmm looks like someone’s plants are dying. Wonder where she’ll find happiness now?

Me: That is very mean you shouldn’t say things like that.

Me internally:

[honeybadger54]

So my youngest step daughter and I go to get donuts the other day...

9 yo: I know what I’m going to get my sister for Christmas

Me: Oh yeah what’s that?

9 yo: Donut holes.

Me: Why?

9 yo: So she can fill the holes in her soul.

[honeybadger54]

i just read a washington post article on romcoms aging poorly due to the pushiness (and oft-stalkery conduct) of the male characters therein, and it got me thinking about pride and prejudice, and specifically darcy saying, “one word from you will silence me on this subject forever.”

because, like, that’s the seldom-portrayed romantic dream in the patriarchal hellscape that is our world, isn’t it?

a dude being willing to say, “i understand if you don’t feel the same way about me, and i’ll leave you alone forever about this if my attention is unwanted.”

so simple, yet so wonderful in its basic human decency

[honeybadger54]

GoT Men as Sandwiches

[honeybadger54]

can you write the dissertation on sansa? i watch game of thrones and i used to find her annoying. she's stopped being so annoying to me but i don't see what you see in her but i'm interested in knowing why you love her so much

my time has come

Sansa starts out as a young, pampered 13 year old girl, who was born to a wealthy, powerful, respected family. She was raised to believe in very specific (feminine) parameters of who she should be, what she should want, and what she should do. And she was good (if not great) at everything she was taught to be and do.

So, like a high-class girl raised the way she was raised, she got the attention of a prince and wanted to be a princess; she was a romantic who believed in knights and songs and - of course, that’s what she wanted. And no, she didn’t think critically about political or social matters at that time - not because she couldn’t but because she was never taught that she should.

And yes, in season one when she was a child, she made mistakes because she was spoiled and could be bratty. And yes, her mistakes did contribute to some of the events that followed, like her father’s fate (but honestly, his death was essentially sealed no matter what because of what a psychopath Joffrey was). And my god, did she pay for it.

She was forced - literally held up - to watch her father get beheaded in front of her while she screams and cries and eventually passes out from the trauma of it.

Then she’s held hostage in King’s Landing, a place so very, very far from home, with the family who is literally killing her own. Physically abused by adult men, emotionally and mentally abused (including forced to look at her father and septa’s beheaded heads). Is forced to constantly put-down and renounce her family as traitors when all she wants is to see them again.

She finds out that her ancestral family home is taken from her family, that her little brothers are dead (yes we know they aren’t but she doesn’t). She’s forced to marry a man over twice her age. She hears about how her brother and mother - the last hope she had to come and rescue her - are brutally murdered.

And not only has to hear about it, but is literally forced to live with the people responsible for killing her entire family. The people who rub her face in the fact that not only is her family dead but that they killed them, who make her watch plays and sing songs glorifying the death of everyone she loved.

All of this while she is only a teenager.

You know what she does? She survives.

She wields her courtesy like armor; she holds her tongue when she wants to lash out and puts up a facade that she isn’t breaking inside.

She starts learning to use her words as her weapons. When Joffrey taunts her, she gives subtle reserved rejoinders that insult him just enough to toe the line (Joffrey: I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you a present. After I raise my armies and kill your traitor brother, I’ll give you his head as well. Sansa: Or maybe he’ll give me yours.)

She adapts and evolves in a world where she feels incredibly alone. Not only alone but feels guilty and stupid.

Then she leaves King’s Landing - after being framed for murder - and is taken into the custody of a creepy man who was in love with her mother and is now in love with her (ugh) and yet, he is all she has at the time to rely on. And from there?

She learns even more; she starts to understand truly how to move the pieces of the game that she’s been thrown into.

But before she even has a say in her own life, she gets brought to Winterfell and is forced to be there with the family who betrayed hers and helped lead them to their deaths before stealing their home. She’s forced to marry the craziest, most monstrous character on the entire show (a man who rapes her, who locks her in a room, who plays mind games with her).

And, she never backs down from him – making comments to plant seeds of doubt about his status as a bastard, “I am Sansa Stark of Winterfell. This is my home. And you can’t frighten me.”

Still, she survives. She jumps off of a literal fucking castle to escape him, goes through feet of snow, through frozen waters and escapes him.

And when she’s finally reunited with her remaining family and Jon presents her with the opportunity to run away from this mess - because he is sick of fighting - it’s Sansa who now has grown this spine of steel. It’s Sansa who stands up for herself, to all of the men in the room who are older who are more familiar with wars and fighting, and asserts that she needs to take the Stark home back from the monster who lives there.

Who wins that war against Ramsay Bolton? Yes Jon - at Sansa’s insistence and while also not consulting her - fought in the war, but he would have been dead if Sansa hadn’t gotten the soldiers from the Vale to help them.

Let’s take the moment to reflect on that, too – Sansa wanted nothing more in the beginning of the show to leave the North. That the North was boring, wanted a new life, wanted to go south, and now? Now all she wants is her home. The home she left behind became all she longed for (it’s also why I’m so absolutely bullshit about Jon bending the knee and giving the North to Dany without even consulting Sansa).

In the end, it’s Sansa - the Northern girl who wanted nothing more than to leave the North when she was a child - who wins back the Stark home. It’s Sansa who underwent that development, that growth, to appreciate where she was from and the life she used to have.

And it’s also Sansa who has the knowledge and the understanding of politics, now, to actually rule the North when the Starks take back Winterfell, let’s be real. Sansa knows how to play the game, now. She knows how to manipulate and how to be diplomatic and how to reign in her emotions.

She plays Littlefinger - one of the smartest players in the game - like a fiddle, using the knowledge she took partly from him, while also cutting him off at the knees with the wit and cutting remarks that she’s learned over the years (“No need to seize the last word, Lord Baelish. I’ll assume it was something clever.”)

When he tries to manipulate her in the last season? She saw through it and orchestrated a plan to double-cross him. Her last words to him - “I’m a slow learner, it’s true. But I learn. Thank you for all your many lessons, Lord Baelish. I will never forget them.” before she gives the nod for Arya to fucking kill him in a court Sansa called?!

A Fucking Queen.

(though I will always contest that she is a slow learner; she was learning and surviving on the tips of her toes at every turn since the end of the first season)

Sansa went through hell and clawed her way back. She did start off as a spoiled child, and she more than paid any kind of “price.”

Sansa lost everything, was held captive, and survived by learning. Using her mind, her words, her politics. She isn’t like Arya and Jon and Bran who had the ability to physically leave the bad situation she was stuck in and find her own path. She isn’t like them in that she doesn’t have the ability to physically fight back.

She is flawed, she’s made mistakes, she’s human. But she has grown. She’s learned from her - and other people’s - mistakes, to become a smart, willful, strategic, diplomatic leader. She takes the best parts of her parents (their courage, their intelligence, their loyalty) and can look back and understand the mistakes they made to try to make sure she and her siblings don’t repeat them.

Sansa Stark is a beautiful, strong, well-developed character, and she deserves the world.

[honeybadger54]

Harry Potter Film Concept Art by Adam Brockbank (x)