A year ago when Jakey began a new daycare, they gave us what felt like reams of paperwork to complete.

One of the questions was Things your baby is afraid of:

We laughed at this question. When Jakey was seven months old, all we could come up with was unexpected loud noises. Almost everyone jumps at unexpected loud noises, but we included it in the name of thoroughness because getting into this daycare was pretty key for us.

Up until a few weeks ago, Jakey didn’t mind being in our walk-in closet in the dark or the garage before we pushed the garage door button.

Then one day dark was scary.

He would race to the threshold of our closet in the middle of a game of chase and pull up short, suddenly wary. During hide and seek this week he refused to go into the downstairs bathroom where Heather was hiding because the light was off.

“No, no, no.”

He backed away and shook his head.

I flipped the light on and he raced back giddy and discovered his mother behind the door. All was right again.

Until tonight when grandma showed him a photo on her iPhone.

Harmless enough. Except it was a photo of a cousin posing next to a 12-foot tall Sasquatch figure at the Peculiarium in Portland. A gigantic upright frame with long brown hair, kind of matted and generally unappealing. Overlong arms with gnarled hands. Ape-ish face like a… Sasquatch.

At first, Jakey was equal parts terrified and drawn to the photo.

He would shake his head and say, “No.” Grandma would put the phone away and then he’d come closer and say, “Sasquatch…?”

Soon his fear heightened and he wanted nothing to do with the photo any longer.

He would hold his arms open to Heather and say, “Sasquatch… hold you.”

Which, for those of us fluent in Jake-ese, means, “I’m afraid of Sasquatch, pick me up, please, pick me up, pick me up.”

We tried and tried to convince him Sasquatch was nothing to worry about. Just make believe, just a big stuffed animal.

To no avail.

So the next time daycare paperwork gets updated I guess we will be adding more than just afraid of the dark. It’s good to keep them up to speed. I would hate for a Sasquatch-related incident to crop up and them not have any warning.

The S-word is now banned in our home, until this whole bigfoot scare blows over.

Although the Sasquatch T-shirts say, “I believe,” it really doesn’t matter if I do or not.

As long as Jakey believes, we will remain a household alert to the possibility that a 12-foot hairy missing link could show up at any moment.

And we’ll be ready.