After sending out a reminder email last night to previous donors and friends from my Gmail list who have not yet donated this year and also sending out a very public message via our Team Slack channel, my inbox has received over a dozen new donation notifications in the last 24 hours. Chris has been closely tracking the progress of my fundraising drive as he does every year, and him being him, he is very competitive and has a lot of commentary about the other people who are “competing” against me for the top fundraiser spots in this year’s Manhattan Out of the Darkness walk. He’s unhappy about the fact that every year I’ve participated, all the people who are usually ahead of me in fundraising are a part of a team, which means that they have more power in numbers in terms of raising funds. So, with that logic, there should be a differentiation between “team” rankings vs. “individual” (that’s me) fundraising rankings, and they should not be grouped together and ranked. I kind of get this rationale, but at the same time, each team member of a team has his/her own page, and therefore they are responsible for their own numbers.

A real message of annoyance from my husband today:

“Bottom line …no. 1 isn’t a real individual fundraiser, …no. 2 as defined as 2 ppl, no. 3 is suspicious, and no. 5, I have said a lot already plus works for AFSP  … and all of them are teams. You win!!!”

I love my baby even when he’s being super cute and excessively competitive. My general response to all this is that at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to raise money for an important cause that often gets overlooked, so the rankings or the teams versus individuals don’t really mean that much to me. But my heart warms when he says combative things like this because he is always the most supportive and thus always wants me to win. I have the most supportive and loving spouse. Ed would be proud and grateful.