[Source: Mooresville Tribune]

Jackson Creager smiles shyly, then buries his face in his mother’s neck as she laughs. She tries to prompt him to talk about his day at the pool, but he just grins and finally answers “yes” when she asks him if he had fun playing in the water.

Jackson is mostly a normal, happy four-year-old. So is his sister Alaina, 2 ½, affectionately known as Lainey. The children love to play games and keep their mother, Lisa, busy.

You would never know by this small interaction at the Creager family’s kitchen table in Huntersville that Jackson and Lainey have apraxia, a motor speech disorder that affects the fine motor skills needed to coordinate the tongue, lips, jaw and palate.

Apraxia is not a developmental delay; it is a disorder that causes children to have difficulty with the programming and planning of speech movements. Or as Lisa Creager put it, “the children know what they want to say, but the messages are getting stuck.”

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