ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Garett and Natalie Bolles were frantically searching for answers as winter turned to spring in 2021. Their 3-year-old son Kingston, at an age when his peers were forming sentences, could only communicate a syllable or two at a time. The family, living at their offseason home in California at the time, traveled to Utah to meet with a speech pathologist who was recommended by Bolles’ sister, a special education teacher in the state.
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A 45-minute session with the pathologist revealed that Kingston had childhood apraxia of speech, a motor speech disorder that creates difficulty in planning and coordinating the muscle movements required to speak. It’s a disorder that impacts roughly one in 1,000 children, but Garett and Natalie quickly realized they were in a perfect position to help their son.
The pathologist told the couple that the world’s most renowned expert in childhood apraxia of speech had recently moved to Colorado.
“We were like, ‘Where in Colorado?'” Garett Bolles, the longtime left tackle for the Denver Broncos, said. “She’s like, ‘Castle Rock.’ I said, ‘Castle Rock?! That’s like 15 or 20 minutes from my house!'”
Garett, Natalie and Garett’s mother immediately began inundating Jennifer Bjorem with emails and text messages. The reply took time.
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