Anyone else ever hear of Apraxia?

Well, just found out more news that just keeps the chaos going in this household. As you know from previous posts, my daughter Kylie is almost 2 years old. She's actually 22 months, but close enough to 2. She hasn't really been talking much. Doing a lot of babbling with a few occasional words. However, those words coming out haven't been very clear either.

We took her in for a hearing and speech evaluation last week. As it turns out, they suspect she may have Apraxia. I had never heard of this before now. I found a website called Apraxia-kids.org that had a great deal of information on it. Apparently, this is one of those conditions that is life-long.

Apraxia is a condition in which the motor functions of the mouth do not function properly. As it is described, the brain thinks about what it wants to say, then sends a message to the muscles in the jaw, tongue, voice-box, etc. and then words are created. With Apraxia, there is a miscue. The message between the brain and the mouth get mixed up. Kids with apraxia have to work on actually managing the muscles to create the words. While kids who have apraxia can be very bright and intelligent, they can often fall behind in school because they cannot communicate verbally very well.

The good thing is that we found it early and we can get her in to speech therapy at a young age. They say she may never really sound "normal" when she does start talking. She may always have difficulty with "r" "s" "th" and "w" sounds and may appear to have an accent.

Is there anyone else out there who has children with this condition? I'm looking forward to hearing from anyone else to see how things have progressed with you and your kids as I embark on this new journey!