Tongue Tied

This past month I have had the luxury of hanging out with my seven year old nephew. He comes over every morning and we hangout for the better part of the day and he leaves. Sometimes he gets bored early and leaves me or he finds a couple of his age mates and goes to have fun. Hanging out with him is a lot of fun because somewhere along the way I think we as adults forgot how to have an adulterated fun and he reminds of it. Every small thing makes him genuinely happy and I love his outlook on life.

 
There are a lot of pleasures of hanging out with him and one of the things that I he does is he reminds me of my short comings. I am not going to talk about my many flaws over here but the thing he painfully reminds me is that how limited my vocabulary is. When we sit down, mostly me and he runs around me, he stops and asks me such a simple question and I am unable to answer him eloquently. Let me give you an example, the other day he asked me what is the meaning of the word option.

 
I was literally tongue tied, I kept on using the word option to explain what it means. Realizing I was going nowhere I decided to use another word to help me out in this predicament. I went like an option is a choice between two or more items. As soon as I said it I realized I had made a mistake because I now hard to explain what a choice is as well as an item. After several minutes of dancing around words and switching languages I think I was able to explain what a choice or an option is. I don't think I got to item and I don't think he remembers either so I am going to count that as a win.

 
I was told to complete understand something you should be able to explain it as if you are talking to a child. Now I have this child with me, and I claim to understand a lot. The irony comes in when I am not able to do explain it. I am so used to using big words, and they fail me all the time especially since I am speaking to this little one. I end up spending time thinking about small words to aid me with the conversation and it turns out to be very challenging.

 
With that challenge it has become a game to me, and I wait for my ever curious nephew to ask me a question and I try to explain it to him so that he can understand it as well as I do. Sadly to say there some questions I cant properly answer- where do babies come from? And I don't know how to explain it keeping the conversation rated PG or G. although I still love explaining stuff to him and when he gets it result!!!!

 
Do you have problems explain stuff to kids the way I do?