Meryl's Notes Blog

Continuing on with our apostrophe lesson (it’s a learning experience for me, too). Individual and joint possession is another point of confusion. Let’s say my parents invite my family for dinner. Yes, my mom is sweet that way. Do we say, “We’re going to dinner at Mom and Dad’s house?” or do we say, “We’re going to dinner at Mom’s and Dad’s house?” It’d be easier to chuck the Mom and Dad deal for “parents,” but we must learn the hard way because not all situations are possible to shrink into one word.

Because Mom and Dad own the house together, the apostrophe need only appear once and on the last word. So, “We’re going to dinner at Mom and Dad’s house” is the correct way.

If the item is individually owned, then each owner earns his own apostrophe. When both of my older kids got in trouble, we took away each of their Gameboys. In other words, each one had one. There are two Gameboys in this picture. Thus, “I have my daughter’s and son’s Gameboys.” If they shared one Gameboy, then you would drop the ’s off daughter. But that would never happen because they’d fight over sharing one and we’d take it away forever.

We only have one Gameboy because someone got too mad and slammed it. The screen broke. Actually, we have two because Mom has one, but no sharing. I forgot what I learned in kindergarten about sharing the minute I became a mom <grin>