John Stamos “always wanted” to be a father.

The 54-year-old actor recently revealed he and his fiancee Caitlin McHugh are expecting their first child together, and he has now claimed that although he has wanted to be a father for as long as he can remember, he was worried he had left it too late.

He said: “I always wanted to be a dad. Clearly I had to do some work on myself first. I have a youthful thing. People say, ‘Oh, you look young.’ You start believing you’re gonna live to be 150. And then you wake up and go, ‘No, man, this is it. This is not a rehearsal.’ … People would say, ‘You should have a child.’ I was like, ‘That ship has sailed.'”

The ‘Fuller House’ star tragically lost his father in 2001 and his mother in 2014, and although they are no longer around, John knows they’ll be with him in spirit to see him enter parenthood himself.

He told People magazine: “It kills me that my parents aren’t here to be part of this, but I know it probably wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t up there. You know how you put your father on a pedestal, and he’s a superhero, and then as you grow older, you go, ‘Ah, he’s just a man’? I never got to that point. Till the day he died, he was bigger than life to me.”

It comes after John revealed he was going to be a “fun dad” to his bundle of joy, and credited his work on hit TV show ‘Fuller House’ and its predecessor ‘Full House’ for giving him experience in being a father.

He said: “I’ll be a fun dad. I’ve been practicing for a long time. I’ve done every schtick you can do with a baby on TV … all the bits and jokes and diaper gags. I’ll probably just do all that stuff.”