By Jon Show — Our family text thread this summer can be categorized in four silos:

Our teenage daughter asking to be picked up or dropped at an inconvenient time and place.

My wife demanding the kids pick up a messy bedroom/kitchen, etc.

Me asking who will be home for dinner.

Our teenage son begging to extend his curfew for no reason whatsoever.

As I sit at my desk at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, the Mother of Dragons has not yet sent her daily … wait … here it is.

“Kids did you fold their laundry like I asked?”

She knows they haven’t but she still sends the same text nearly every day, along with a request that one of them fold a pile of towels that’s been sitting in the bonus room since, I don’t know, June?

Future Man, as always, does not respond to her text. On this most recent occasion, the Blonde Bomber responds thusly, “Did you know if you sleep with a fan on all night you die.”

Period. Not a question mark. This confuses me because she sleeps with a fan on every night, so I reply:

“Working from home in the summers is a memory that I will cherish forever.”

Girl power

The Blonde Bomber is 14 years old and does not have a regular job this summer. She babysits every couple weeks, which fills her account with enough cash to last exactly four-and-a-half days because Starbucks is bleeding American families dry.

Summers mean more sleepovers, which is awesome because the nighttime volume level created by four 14-year-old girls is on par with a murder of crows being murdered.

Also, the amount of discarded wrappers and soiled dishes that teenage girls can amass between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. is only surpassed by the amount of food they can eat between sunset and daylight hours.

Chips. Popsicles. Frozen pizzas. Chicken nuggets. Mozzarella sticks. All gone. During one sleepover this summer, one or more of them had access to DoorDash, and at some point Taco Bell and I think Raising Cane’s was delivered to our home.

Do we even have Raising Cane’s? A quick Google search shows the nearest location is in Rock Hill.

Boy band

Future Man has a job for the second straight summer. He helps work sports camps for the parks and recreation department.

Each morning he arises, grabs his egg and sausage sandwich off the counter, and heads to work. He returns each day around noon acting as if he was returning from a month-long stint in a coal mine.

“We rode 15 miles today at bike camp. 15 MILES. FIFTEEN!”

I just smile and quietly laugh and hope he didn’t steal my underwear out of my closet, which I hide in different locations each week to lessen the likelihood that he’ll find them. He, of course, denies taking them.

Me: “Stop taking my underwear.”

Him: “I don’t take your underwear bro.”

Me: “Then why were there five pairs laying on your pile of clean laundry in the hallway?”

One afternoon I took my broke daughter to lunch at Jimmy John’s and asked my son if he wanted anything, and he requested a loaf of bread so he could carbo-load before the gym.

For some reason they sold me a frozen loaf, and rather than wait 10 minutes for it to thaw, he just broke it in half and walked out the door shirtless holding half a frozen cylinder of bread.

Each night around 11 p.m. he commandeers a piece of furniture from our home so he can play Grand Theft Auto in his room and eat the remainder of his 200 grams of daily protein.

Dinner time

I make dinner each night for our family, and in the summer I get the unwelcome task of trying to guess if the kids will be here to eat it or not.

More often than not they won’t, which is fine. They’re teenagers and they shouldn’t want to be at home. I just want to know before I cook dinner.

But one day last month, with our fish-hating daughter at a sleepover, I texted my wife and son and offered to make his favorite dish of blackened cod if he was going to be home.

He responded with a heart emoji, so I defrosted three pieces of cod, but then three hours later he told me he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

I expressed confusion as to what, exactly, the heart emoji meant and he said this:

“I meant I appreciate it and I’ll eat at home if I have nothing else going on but my friends and I are going to grab some food tonight.”

This is what happens when a society reverts to communicating in hieroglyphics.

The next day the girl texted me a picture of some Chinese food she was eating in a restaurant and asked if I knew how to make it. In the picture was a meal I stopped making five years ago because she told me she didn’t like it.

Oh sinner man

I know there are so many of you with grown children reading this who are thinking things like, “What awful children!” And you’re right. But they’re still my awful children.

Or perhaps you have young children and, like I once thought, this reality will never become yours. Just know that I, too, once held your pie-in-the-sky dreams, but those are dead now. Fully receded, like my hairline.

Someday you’ll have a text thread, or whatever godforsaken method of communication replaces a poop symbol, middle finger and five colors of hearts, and you will likely experience the atomic bomb that is summer vacation with teenagers.

The background noise of your weekends will be arguments about piles of laundry and dirty rooms. You will add “clean the kitchen” to your morning to-do list. You will be certain that your daughter’s friends are stealing your phone chargers.

Every. Damn. Day. Until summer ends.

If you see me in Target buying a bedside fan please know that I could use a hug.

The headline is a nod to this month’s Milling About column. Lindsay is having a much different summer than I am.

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Jon Show lives in Robbins Park with his wife, who he calls “The Mother of Dragons.” Their 17-year-old son is “Future Man” and their 14-year-old daughter is “The Blonde Bomber.” Their dog is actually named Lightning.