"Mommy's? Monkey's?"
"That's correct, Estelle. Good job. Wait. No thank you. Set that down. That's Daddy's coffee. Yucky."
"Daddy's," you say. "Yucky."
The apostrophe-s is your latest verbal construction. You mastered nouns first. Verbs took an exciting second. More recently assembling subjects and predicates has strung together entertaining bursts of conversation. "Vroom [babble babble] Estelle," you say. "Drink [babble] milk [babble] cup, please."
Your dad can only imagine this is what conversation sounds like to you when your Mom and Dad are talking: "Hey, hon, [babble] milk [babble babble] presidential primaries. Yucky."
But apostrophe-s denotes possession. Apostrophe-s is nine-tenths of the law. Thankfully you don't feel acquisition is as important as denoting what belongs to whom. Soon enough we'll take two steps back once you transform everything into "mine, mine, mine," but for now it's Mommy's cookie or Monkey's banana or Daddy's yucky.
