Yeah, good question.

Plus, isn't it amazing how incredibly different - yet how much the same, each woman's labour can be!

I was told that labour is counted when a woman is considered to be in "established labour" but never found out what that was??

I was one of those strongly labouring for a few days, started with 10 min apart contractions at midnight on a Sunday/Monday which kept me from sleeping and delivered my DD at midnight on Tuesday/Wednesday. So 48 hours by my calculations!

However, I usually say 36 hours as this is when the contractions went from 'ouchie' that wasn't pleasant to 'holy moly' and began to really ramp up! Plus I always feel that if I say 48 hours people won't believe me!

And of course that all meant 3 nights without sleep... that was much more torturous than the actual labour !