The first thing Ryan Reynolds would like you to know about having kids is: Don’t listen to what Ryan Reynolds thinks about having kids. “Picture advice being loaded into Super Soakers,” he says, grinning. He looks me up and down—I’m 33, about to be married, on the brink of it. “You’re running around all dry and fancy-free—you’re gonna be, like, drenched,” he warns me. “The one piece of advice I would say is: Don’t listen to any advice. Because there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it.”

Reynolds is 38 and on his eight or ninth Hollywood lifetime—he’s been the cult-comedy guy from Van Wilder and the romantic-comedy guy from The Proposal and the guy in a CGI suit talking to a tennis ball in Green Lantern. He’s been the next big thing more times than he can count. But right now his life can be summed up in far more elemental terms. There’s the rustic house about an hour of north of New York City, where he and his wife, Blake Lively, have chosen to live and raise their daughter, James. And then there’s the baby-monitor app on his iPhone, which buzzes every couple seconds as we sit upstairs in the renovated barn next to the main house. “This is your future right here,” he says, showing me the cascade of alerts on his phone. James is 8 months old and about a hundred feet away, with her mother. And that’s what’s become of Ryan Reynolds.

Photos: Ryan Reynolds Shows Us How To Be the Most Stylish Dad on the Block

“I’ve learned that an inordinate amount of clichés are completely true,” he says. “Like, there is this kid here that I would walk through fire for. Or maybe not fire. Like, a very hot pavement, I’d walk through. A shag rug.”

Are you the father you hoped you’d be?

“I think I am, yeah. I can’t say I had an easy relationship with my father, and I can’t say my brothers did either, but I look at each of my older brothers, and they’re all fathers, and they’re all great fathers. So I had some good examples. But I don’t think you really necessarily need examples. You just try to not be a complete pile of shit and just be there for them. You know, I like it: I mean that in the heaviest context. I genuinely like it. I like being a father. I like having a daughter. I would like to have more kids. You know, it seems to suit me pretty well.”

Did that surprise you?

“I’m surprised how patient I am with it. I feel like I could sometimes have a bit of a short fuse, but there’s just been this weirdly endless supply of patience. I have no problem waking up five times in the middle of the night and changing diapers, and as exhausted as you get, I have this stupid grin on my face all the time. And that’s not because I have a nanny or something like that. It’s just us right now, and I love it.”

You were talking about having complicated feelings about the way you were raised. Does having a kid change that?

“Yeah, in a lot of different ways that I think are cool. One is that you become a lot more forgiving. Once you have a kid, you just think, like, ‘I can’t believe that another person did all this shit for me, that I’m doing for this person right now!’ Like, that somebody woke up in the middle of the night this many times just to wipe my ass. It’s just profound to me. So you start to have a great deal more respect for your own parents. Not that I didn’t already. But I don’t know how my parents did it with four kids. Four boys! Who basically did everything short of setting their own home on fire every single day of their lives. It’s gotta be pretty intense.”

What have you learned about yourself from the experience so far?