Brady Jones is a star and he doesn't even know it.

Brady of Hanahan is the cover boy of the November issue of Parents magazine, currently on newsstands.

A magazine subscriber, his mother, Molly Jones, knew about the cover model contest, but didn't really think about it until she saw a friend on Facebook urging people to vote for her child. In May, Jones went online and entered Brady, the younger of her two sons.

"I uploaded a picture and then didn't think about it again because whose kid is going to win?" she says. "It isn't going to be mine. I thought he was just one of a billion kids that entered, so I just completely forgot about it."

Then she got an e-mail in June asking her to send five more photos because Brady, with his chubby cheeks and strawberry blond hair, was a semi-finalist. The next week, he was named one of 10 finalists out of more than 100,000 children entered.

The magazine flew Jones, her husband, Robert, a lawyer at Qualey Law Firm, and Brady to New York for an all-expense-paid three-day trip the week before Brady's first birthday in August. (Hayden, 3, stayed home with his grandparents because he had gone with his parents on a business trip to Washington, D.C., the week before.)

"We stayed in a nice hotel and went to a Madison Avenue studio where they took pictures," Jones says. "We met the other finalists. It was really insane."

Jones thought that Brady, who she says has a sweet disposition, had done well in the shoot, but "when we left, they told us they'd be in touch and congratulations for getting this far," Jones says. "Then two weeks later, they called and said he'd gotten the cover. The funny thing is, it was such a fluke. We are the least likely people to ever enter a contest like that."

The family was asked to keep the news a secret until the magazine hit newsstands Oct. 7.

"I brought it in to work and people reacted like I had just gotten engaged or something," says Jones, who works in marketing at Blackbaud.

To turn it into a memory for Brady, now 14 months, Jones has asked friends on Facebook to send photos of the magazine on newsstands across the country.

"I'm going to make him a map and say you were seen in all these places," she says. "It's all really fun for his baby book."

Jones says it's weird to walk into a store and see the cover. They show it to Brady, who points and smiles but probably doesn't realize that the cute baby is him.

"Hayden has handled it really well," she says. "He says, 'I'm so proud of my little brother.' "

Even so, Jones suspects Brady's modeling career will end here.

"If an agent called us, we'd probably jump on it," she says. "But it's not something we'd actively pursue. It's just part of life's journey that you sit back and enjoy for the moment."

Brenda Rindge can be reached at 937-5713.