to feel resentful I’ve used my AL for childcare while DH saves his for child-free time?

Then you need to have the conversation with DH then. Nothing will change unless you start communicating will it?

I assign my DH his leave for the year to cover school holidays
he has five days a year that cannot be used for pre planning he can do what his wants with

Why don’t you both share responsibility for your DS?

You need to have a talk with him about what he actually brings to your relationship and your little family as from what you've said you might as well divorce him as you're doing everything yourself. What does he actually do for your household? For his child? Tell him what you expect re household and parenting and if he doesn't step up it's divorce.

I get where you are coming from, I'm not the main bread winner but I do work . My holiday is always booked for nursery closures etc. I don't resent that because he is my world but my husband enjoys his as time out going away for hobbies. Meanwhile I don't get time to shower in peace alot of the time.

Not not not NOT unreasonable!

Even the fact that you call it “childcare”
is odd. Surely if it’s your own child, it’s just parenting and spending time with your child 😏

I don't know why you didn't discuss this before Christmas, or even before having a child together.
You made assumptions, and presumably so did he, so I think you are both unreasonable.
Have a discussion now about what you expect going forward.

FGS. We didn't argue about it, at all and certainly not in front of the DC. I was a perfectly present mum for the entirety of the 3 years i spent at home, we did all the things that people do: crafts, playgroups etc.

I had bad PND and a lot of the times i was going through the motions. I have talked about this with my now adult DC as they have a friend going through similar. I have offered tips and advice and sympathy - and of course they wanted to know how i know so much about it.

Luckily for me, my DH then took parental leave for a couple of years, and it got a lot easier for ALL of us. But the key for our home life was that we discussed who would be doing what and when, and yes sometimes i did more for a few weeks and sometimes he did. The key was a calendar and discussion

So again: all the sanctimonious "oh i can't imagine HOW someone couldn't love every second of it" can get in the sea.

OP has left the building 🤷🏼‍♀️

This is so true, we often hear about men with Big Jobs/high earnings, leaving the child’s mother to do the bulk of the childcare. But the OP has ended up with the Big Job AND all the childcare. - this needs sorting!

I came to say the same thing, but you've put it far better (and more politely) than I could have.

No point telling us - tell him. You know its not right, its not a fair split.

Either he shapes up or ships out

Whether he wanted a child is irrelevant, he has a child and so needs to consider their needs and plan accordingly.

Change the title of your OP to Dear Husband, change “my 21 month year old” to “our 21 month year old” (your language here is quite telling). Then print the whole thing off and hand it to him.

YABU for not discussing this before getting to this point, and for not discussing it now. You've just assumed this, and assumed that then gotten the arses and booked AL without even saying "what are we doing?"

Exactly, but better for young children if parents can cut back on working hours and go without a few things in order to spend more time together whilst they are young. Then annual leave is for family time not time to recover from being so knackered. I’d rather reduce working hours than time with my children. Its a short season where they are young, and pretty obvious no parent will have anywhere near the same amount of free time regardless for hobbies/exercise/self-care/socialising than they had pre-children, it’s an unrealistic expectation, especially if you have multiple under-5s. Those things will naturally increase as they get older, it’s all hands on deck initially.

Is it a communication issue?
This is the first year you've needed to think about this, and his default attitude has been pretty selfish.
I think I'd be telling him that it isn't going to be like this for future nursery closures, as this isn't fair at all, and you expected more thought from him. You're exhausted and that's his attitude.
You should make it absolutely clear

This

But you’re both in a situation where you have a lot of free time. If both of you were working full time 9-5 with 21-25 days leave to cover school holidays your lives would be vastly different.
Sometimes parents need a break and that’s ok. If you have a few days off using childcare so you can go back to the office feeling rested isn’t a bad thing.

Absolutely! Mine said to me last year re the holidays ‘tell me what you need’ and I lost it- it’s not about the bare minimum you have to commit to your family nor is it about what I’ve sorted and then tell him. He can be a dad and husband and think himself with his own brain about what’s best for his kids, then talk to me about it.

We love family time but we do split annual leave as our kids like downtime over doing holiday programs all holidays, I expect most kids do?? I can’t prioritise having both of us at home over giving our dc some unstructured time, so we do some together and some separately to benefit the dc, that seems the best approach for our dc.

I can’t relate to either parent in this scenario.

I’ve got 2 young children. If I was unfortunate enough to be forced to work, then any time off I had I’d be desperate to spend with them.

My DH is the breadwinner, but gets ample time off work as a teacher. He spends all of his school holidays engaging with our children, playing board gages, Lego, football, going on walks, picnics, day trips, etc. It wouldn’t cross his mind to use childcare when he’s off work, so yeah, neither of us can relate to the husband in this scenario.

We are a couple who always take annual leave together and spend it doing family things :) We sent our kids to a childminder who is open all year round so we didn’t have to worry about term time and once our son was old enough to go to pre-school/school he started attending holiday clubs as well.

As YOU are the main breadwinner then HE needs to be the one to sacrifice his time off etc to do the childcare which is what happens in every other normal relationship! If he loses his job over this then it isn’t a problem as you cover all the bills anyway