Breaking The Rules

I shocked my oldest daughter today when I sat down and began to cut some pages out of my new sketch book.

"You're cutting up a book?"  This is, for obvious reasons, a rule in our house.  We don't destroy books.

I looked at her briefly before running the exacto knife along the page, severing it from the book.  "Yes"

"Why?"  she didn't even try to hide the shock and perhaps there was even a little disgust in her voice. The very idea that I would do something so disrespectful to a book.

OK.  I admit that this is novel thing for me to do.  I have taken books apart before that I found already coming apart at used book stores so I could use the pages for art projects, but to take a brand new book and slice a page (actually about 10 pages) out of it was interesting.

"Sometimes you have to take things apart to make something better out of it."  I explained to my daughter.  I told her how I wanted to make some collages in my new sketchbook, and if I didn't take some of the pages out the thicker pages from the collage would stress the seams and the book would, eventually, split it's binding.  Then nothing would work the way I wanted it to.

She nodded... stilly eyeing the stack of unused, and now unbound pages.  Then a slow smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

"What are you going to do with those?" 

"I don't know."

"Can I have them?" the fire of a new project already burning in her, just like it does with me.  How could I say no?