Misaki's Famous Face Rub

Misaki does a lot of cute things, but some of them are even cuter than others. Perhaps the most amazing and unpredictable is something we call the "face rub."

The face rub consists of Misaki, well, pushing herself around on the carpet face first with her back paws while her front legs go down to her knees, effectively serving as skis for her to slide on. When she's done she pops back up onto four legs and looks at you with a face saying: "What? Nothing just happened here." It's not like she's embarrassed, but more like it's just something that doesn't need discussion.

When this first happened the day after we got her last year, we thought maybe she had an itch or something was wrong with her, but it doesn't seem to be that. After awhile we decided it was just part of Misaki being Misaki and decided to get it on film.

The problem with that is timing. I'm not going to follow her around all the time with camera, so we had to figure out when she was likely to do it, and then be ready.

It seems this behavior is most likely to occur when:

1 - She gets up in the morning after sleeping in her crate.
2 - She gets out of her crate when we get back from the store or something, a little bit of time after the zoomies.
3 - Shortly after a meal.

Still, those are general times. Sometimes it's right away, sometimes it's not at all. We've also figured out it's possibly to induce face rubbing with a particularly excitable set of petting (holy crap that sounds so, so wrong...). Get her worked up enough and she has to do the face rub.

Which, of course, means we can get some pictures. The ones that follow here actually came after she came back from outside, which was right after a meal.

First comes the dropping to the front knees and rubbing on the left cheek.

Look closely at her neck. Yep, she's dirty. Apparently face rubs happen outside in the dirt too. With Misaki being a typical cleanly Shiba, pointing this out embarrasses her to no end.

Then she rolls over to the right cheek.

Then comes the pushing from the back legs and scooting across the carpet.

Switches back to the left cheek...

And again onto the right.

And she pops back up to her feet.

Perfectly normal. And perfectly entertaining.

My hope is to one day get this on video - then you can get the full experience, replete with Misaki's cute little purring/grunting/groaning noises accompanying the rubbing.

Uh oh, considering how annoyed Misaki was here and mad we were figuring her out here, I have no idea what she's going to say on her blog about this...

UPDATE: Well, it didn't take long for Misaki to weigh in...