7-Year-Old Is Boy Wonder ‘I Hate Just Sitting There,’ Says Kid For Whom ‘Everything’s Art’

Parker Jones Age: 7 Vocation: Inventor, poet, artist

Nobody throws away drawings at the Jones residence.

Seven-year-old Parker Jones won’t allow it.

“That’s art,” he says, referring to the hundreds of pictures he’s sketched in the last five years. “Everything’s art.”

Parker finds meaning in everything, the adults in his life say.

He loves details, species names, every little piece of Lego. He notes the change of color in a bird’s wing, the turn of a phrase in a poem.

“He’s just interested in so much,” says his mother, Carol Hanshaw.

Sure, all kids are imaginative. But many say Parker takes innovation to a new level.

Check out the blueprint for his future home. Most kids paint doors, windows, walls. Parker includes a nature room with a jungle, a library, a planetarium with a retractable roof.

And he doesn’t just draw “birds.” Parker sketches cardinals, red-wing blackbirds, ducks specific to this area. Beneath a recent drawing of a blue heron, Parker wrote, “If I was the president, I would have more wetlands because they cut down on floods.”

“This little guy sits in class and comes up with the most amazing ideas,” says Alice Keating, Parker’s teacher at Moran Prairie Elementary. “He has a sophisticated sense of humor. He’s always thinking.”

He can’t stay still, Parker admits one afternoon, climbing counters and jumping from chair to chair. He runs to his room every five minutes to find another piece of work he wants to show off.

“I always want something to do,” says Parker, a second-grader. “I hate just sitting there.”

So who’s responsible for this whirlwind? His teachers, says his mother, but she’ll take some of the credit, too.

Since the family moved here five years ago from Seattle, Hanshaw and her husband, Marsh Jones, have surrounded their two sons with crayons and blank pieces of paper. Their dining room has become a part-time art studio. Books line the shelves, along with a rainbow of marking pens and pencils. Paper masks and sketches hang on the wall.

Jones and Hanshaw also involved the kids in their own “adopt-a-grandparent” program. For the past few years, Owen and Parker have visited elderly people in the area to bring them flowers or cards and pictures they’ve made.

Hanshaw started reading to Parker when he was a baby. By the time he was 9 months old, he had at least a 20-word vocabulary. “He loves words,” says Hanshaw, who chose to stay at home with her kids until Owen, her youngest, started kindergarten.

Now, Parker brings home at least 20 books each time they go to the library.

Together, mother and sons read C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” Beverly Cleary stories and books about nature and wildlife.

Parker doesn’t have a bedtime, his mom says. Sometimes, he reads past 10 p.m. And except for shows like “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and “Reading Rainbow,” he doesn’t watch much TV.

Despite his lisp and little-boy voice, Parker sometimes talks as though he’s in junior high. He and his mom have conversations about slavery and the Holocaust. He doesn’t like Power Rangers, he told his mom. He’d rather talk about beluga whales.

Although he uses words like “stampeded” instead of “ran,” he’s still a regular child with “second-grade humor,” his mother says. He laughs about food and makes fun of his little brother.

Like most kids his age, he also has big dreams. At 2, Parker told his mother he wanted to be “a world-class organist.” They were listening to a Saint-Saens organ symphony.

Now, he wants to be an inventor. “I like making three-dimensional things,” he says, “and I’m good at improvising, that’s for sure.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo