Inside Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ Family World as Parents of 4

In 2015, he recalled telling Lively that he loved her more than anything, so much he would take a bullet for her. And once they had James, he said on the Late Show With David Letterman, “the second I looked in that baby’s eyes, I knew in that exact moment that if we were ever under attack, I would use my wife as a human shield to protect that baby.”

Even waking up in the middle of the night, the new dad rhapsodized to E! at the time, “you got a big stupid smile on your face. Anything else that woke you up every 45 minutes, you’d kill it. But when it’s a baby, it’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”

And it’s in these quiet moments that he continued to have real epiphanies.

“You worry about really stupid stuff,” he told TODAY‘s Willie Geist about the possibility of then-3-month-old James becoming an actor one day. “And you sorta sit there and go, ‘Oh gosh, is she gonna wanna do this?’ I like to whisper in her ear, like, really normal everyday jobs…’You’re going to be a flight attendant…a barista…Just normal, wonderful jobs that you can have a nice, normal life.'”