Autism can be spectacular. When we climb a mountain of prompts, hand over hand instruction, small tiny moments of connection, then in an instant, a light switch, and we have success. When I think of Nixon’s success, I like to think of it as an astronaut who had trained for months and months to walk into a rocket ship. The rocket ship might not launch, but we are all watching waiting to see as we hear a quiet countdown. When our son was starting to talk, we couldn’t understand a lot of what he was trying to communicate. He didn’t speak much until he was about 3 1/2, which caused…