Happy Holidays from GOST! Hope your stockings won’t be filled with coal.
A funny thing happened while “shopping” this year. I have a warehouse full of awesome gifts (GOST Product, hello!), so holiday shopping is usually a breeze. Well I promised a good friend a GOST Zombie T-shirt in yellow, but sold out of them before I had a chance to grab him one. A promise is a promise, so I did something I’ve never done before and went online to shop for a GOST shirt! I ended up finding exactly what I was looking for at Aggressive Mall and paid full retail for one of my own shirts.
Amall let’s you write reviews of the products that you purchase to help assist other buyers. I couldn’t resist writing a review of my GOST Zombie shirt!
Here’s hoping that you all find exactly what you’re hoping for (GOST tees!) under your Christmas trees this year.
The GOST “Super Company” tee is already a bona fide hit this Holiday season. Now, to make your Holidays even merrier GOST and Amall have teamed up to offer your favorite tee in two super exclusive colors. This shirt was originally only available in Black, but now (and for a limited time only) you can also get the Super Co. tee at Amall in White or Super Co. Green! Hurry because these are only available in limited quantities and they will be gone quick!
OMG! Check out this graphic I made for the new GOST Holiday line that is about to drop! Taking it back to the roots.
Speaking of the roots and the good old days of skating guess who stopped by the GOST offices recently. It was none other than B Love Hardin. If you don’t remember B Love from the Hoax 2 Days (you need to study your history!) then perhaps you might remember him from his insane drunken exploits as documented here on the GOST blog.
B Love stopped by to chop it up and talk about some new business ventures. Let’s just say he wants to become a kind of white trash Bill Gates.
My girlfriend’s youngest son Ross (we call him Rossi) just celebrated his 6th birthday recently.
I am fond of saying that Christmas and birthdays are two of my favorite occasions. And it is not just because I am so into the spirit of giving. In fact it is just the opposite; I am into the spirit of taking away!
Kids need discipline and one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal, as parents of young children, is the ability to take things away. The more the kids care about the things that they have, the more it hurts when we take it away and the more powerful our position as parents becomes. That is why I love gift giving holidays; it means more awesome stuff for the kids and more leverage for us!
This birthday was a whopper for Rossi. He was first introduced to Mario via his Nintendo DS handheld system and has been an enthusiastic player of the “New Super Mario Bros.” for some time already. Rossi was so obsessed with Mario that instead of watching cartoons or even playing video games like most kids he would instead go onto youtube and watch walkthroughs of Super Mario video games. For those of you unfamiliar with walkthroughs it is where you watch someone else playing a video game and narrating as they “walk you through” it offering tricks and tips along the way.
Rossi’s favorite walkthroughs, by far, were for the Wii game Super Mario Galaxy 2 one of the best reviewed video games of all time. The problem was that not only did we not have the Super Mario Galaxy Game we didn’t even have a Wii console.
All of that changed the morning of Rossi’s birthday when he became the proud owner of both the Wii console and Super Mario Galaxy 2.
Rossi got a lot of other awesome gifts like rollerblades and glow-in-the-dark skeleton PJs (which each became even MORE awesome when paired with the other!).
But they all paled in comparison to the mighty Wii.
Between the DS and the iPhone and the old Playstation 2 I knew how much time the kids could spend playing video games. And I knew that once the Wii arrived things would only get worse.
So in anticipation of this I attempted to ratchet up my parenting skills. A couple of weeks before Rossi’s birthday (and the imminent arrival of the Wii) I devised a chart system to help monitor how much time the kids were spending playing video games.
I drew it up in Illustrator and then took it to Kinko’s (FedEx Office) to have it printed out and laminated complete with individualized Super Mario Bros. avatars for each of the kids.
It has been over a month now since we first implemented the system and it has worked great. We can take time away for unacceptable behavior and we can reward extra time for good behavior. Now they put their dishes away and clean their rooms and say “please” and “thank you,” but the best part is that they are learning how to budget their time. The kids start out with a block of video game time each weekend, usually about three-and-a-half hours a day, so it puts the power into their hands as they figure out how to manage their own time.
They are careful not to spend all of their time in one sitting, so they will play video games for thirty minutes or an hour and then figure out something else to do like color or go outside…
Or maybe even go rollerblading!
And that is the true mark of good discipline, not when we have to punish or take things away, but when we can teach the kids how to manage on their own. That is the gift that keeps on giving. Happy Birthday Rossi!
Arlo
GOST
Whether unloading cargo or grabbing lunch with Tara Reid at Spago, G-MO is dressed for any occasion in this fashionable look inspired by New York City's longshoremen.
