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When I was young, my dad would do cheesy magic tricks and let me walk on his feet. He'd let me and my sister dress him up and put clips in his hair. Growing up he helped with my homework and cultured my love for learning and writing. This all fostered really wonderful memories.
As an adult, the one thing that I would change about my relationship with him is that I'd wish he could better express his emotions. He's very emotionally shut-in and we recently went through the deaths of his brother and his mom and that man has cried once. I know he feels sad but he just acts like everything's okay and that's hard for me to watch and hard for me to know how to be there for him. My mom, on the other hand, is very emotionally open and I always know that she needs me to talk or to just be there with her. I guess more so than expressing his emotions, I just wish he'd tell me what he needs, but we come from a culture of machismo where he learned he's not supposed to need things, especially from women.
Anyways, just be there for your baby girl. Enjoy your time together, and she'll have plenty of great memories with her dad.
As someone who has trouble with his emotions, I can tell you that for me it has nothing to do with being macho or manly, it is about depression. My depression stems from childhood trauma and abuse, but it doesn't really matter the source of the depression if it is crushing the ability to feel out of you.
I mean, I don't think it's that he's not feeling things, my mom definitely heard him crying at night and stuff. He just does his best to hide it from us.
I know what you mean though about depression shutting you down, and I don't doubt there's plenty of trauma in his past so it's probably just a bit of everything.
I hope you're well <3