There’s nothing as great as a teaching moment…except for a teaching moment that turns even more exceptional in the course of the day.

Yesterday morning, as we were getting ready for school, Eliav came into the kitchen and said, “Look Mommy. I don’t have any hands.”

Yes, virtually every child in the history of the world has played this game, tucking his hands into his sweatshirt and declaring himself handless.

Rather than giggle awkwardly or move on and ignore it, I decided to take the energy to create a teaching moment. So I said, “Eliav, you know it’s not so nice to do that or think it’s funny. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t have hands.”

“You mean like Binyamin who broke his arm,” Eliav replied.

“No, sweetie, I mean like people who either lose a hand or an arm in an accident or might be born without a hand.”

“Born without a hand? Why would that happen?”

And so we spent a few minutes talking about birth defects and how Hashem sometimes makes things turn out differently than you would expect. And the conversation was over.

And then, as so often happens, a few hours later I noticed a video that was going around Facebook that hit on EXACTLY the topic we were discussing. So, I watched the inspirational video and then I gathered the boys around last night and showed it to them.

“Wow,” Eliav said. “That’s so cool.”

And then we talked about differences and challenges and the kids brought up another – absolutely incredible – video that I showed to them recently.

These are the moments that parenthood is made of.