When your kids reach thirteen years of age they are abducted by aliens who insert alien brains in place of theirs, which are programmed to torture parents for the following five years. The plan is working perfectly so far in our house.
The first sign of alien abduction in your child is the reduction of a full normal twelve year old vocabulary to three words: Huh, what and whatever. Those three words will serve their needs for the next five years and can be used in any order.” Huh, whatever, what, or whatever, huh and what.” Sometimes you might get the shorter sentence that just includes: “huh.” If the alien is tired, which seems to happen frequently when asked to do chores, you might get an alien grunt. “uh.” Aliens do not seem to enjoy chores, or work for that matter.
Your job as alien parent is to communicate using only these three words as indicators of their respective needs. Sort of like the game show Password without clues. The odd thing about their alien brains are how they can speak with other aliens their age at length about virtually anything, until a human adult enters the room, which immediately reverts the conversation back to alien speak: whatever! If you are quiet while driving the car full of alien teenagers they will forget you are in the car and thus relax the three word limit and show emotion and laughter. I suggest taking a tape recorder to try and translate this conversation at a later date.
Another feature of the female alien teenagers is their need for extended hours of sleep and straight hair, which they use as an antenna to receive text messages from the mother ship. They decode those messages onto their phone under the disguise of text messages at 780 words per minute using only two alien thumbs, which look identical to human thumbs.
One strange byproduct of alien culture is their need to spend our human money in large amounts. For the female alien this often is accomplished in dress and shoe stores, which I believe are managed by alien retirees as their version of our Florida retirement model. Male aliens spend your money by purchasing videos, to sharpen their combat skills for the upcoming alien invasion.
The alien teenage diet consists of soda, tacos, sometimes popcorn. That is all I can figure out they eat for nourishment. Their alien body uses this nutrition in massive amounts and then expelled out of the body through their skin during the daily three hour shower. I have decoded some alien texts and their master plan is to rule our planet by causing complete financial insolvency of parents by having to pay huge hot water bills. That plan is working in our house so far.
The particular aliens that inhabit our teenagers can get cranky and moody which might be a byproduct of living on earth with our low levels of oxygen. You might detect that as “attitude.” This is another clear sign of alien abduction and will cease once they reach twenty years of age, replaced by a complete lack of desire to get a job, another form of alien transformation we will discuss later.
Another byproduct of raising male aliens in your house is they smell. The alien foot seems to be the source of this chemical weapon and must be handled very delicately by spending the remaining money after your hot water bill on the washing machine. It’s not uncommon to clean alien clothes twice a day and still use human forms of deodorant to hide the alien chemical trail.
Although technically an alien, we still love our daughter and look forward to getting her back at age twenty when she won’t be working, but will speak with us again. I’m currently not aware of any way to beat the aliens.