The Kiss

Iris now has all the elements of kissing - an open mouth placed against someone else's face accompanied by a lip-smacking noise - down. But the elements don't always come together. Sometimes it's just an alarmingly wide open mouth, pressed against your nose or eyeball. Other times, when a kiss is requested, she comes over to simply tap your cheek with her index finger, as if to indicate she knows where the kisses go, but is too busy to actually give you one. And recently, if she's occupied with some other important task, like finding just the right book to read or grunting at the darkened television, she sometimes just tosses the smacking noise in your direction. Many kisses, however, are lavished upon her favorites in her book of cat breeds (a rather wild-eyed British shorthair and an orange "exotic shorthair" that is not, in our opinion, the least bit attractive), as well as on the baby in the mirror.