Happy Birthday Jami!

Amanda (Pregnant with Reagan) and Jami at Amber's wedding 8-29-05

Happy Birthday to my sweet friend Jami (Hobbs) Hansen!! Jami and I met back in high school, not because we went to school together, but because she was dating my cousin Tyler. She would come to family parties and we just naturally hit it off. Even after she and Tyler broke up, we remained close friends and to this day, my Aunt Collette wishes she had married Tyler and become a part of our family. Everyone who knows Jami absolutely loves her ~ she's just one of those people who is always happy, sweet and kind to everyone around her. She's happily married to Kory and they happen to live on the same street as my other good friend Natalie. I introduced the two of them and now they are friends too ... last year, they flew here together to spend a weekend with me. We had such a wonderful time that weekend! I was almost 8 weeks pregnant with Avery at the time, so we weren't announcing my pregnancy yet. I walked all of Manhattan with these two girls who were both in incredible shape and felt like I was going to die when the weekend was over!! It was the most exhausting weekend I can remember, but completely worth it. Since I wasn't "blogging" back then, I figured I'd share some of our fun photos from our site-seeing weekend in the city:

Natalie and Jami on Wall Street in front of the NYSE 3-30-07

Jami and Amanda in front of the window display at Macy's Herald's Square 3-30-07

Amanda and Natalie in Times Square 3-30-07

Natalie and Jami in our hotel room, looking for somewhere to have dinner before the show

Jami and Nat in our hotel lobby before the Broadway show ... we saw "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" which was hilarious!

We had a late dinner after the show, then took this picture (then went back to the hotel and crashed!)

We got up rather early the next day (Saturday) and went to the top of the Empire State Building

Chinatown

On Saturday night, we went ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza

After ice skating, we took a ride to Smith & Wollensky's for dinner


By Sunday morning, we had already covered all of lower and midtown Manhattan, so we went uptown by Central Park

Jami was so excited to go to her favorite store for athletic wear, lululemon athletica (Jami has run several marathons!)

Central Park

We tried to make reservations for Serendipity, but you had to call a couple months in advance.

What a wonderful weekend we had together! My first trip to NYC was with Jami when I was in college ... she was living in Washington DC doing an internship with a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, so I went to visit her over the week of Thanksgiving. After spending a few days in DC, we took a bus to NYC together and had a really fun weekend. It makes me laugh that I live here now and she came to visit me :)

Braden (8), Jami, Ava (3), Megan (3 weeks), and Chase (5)

Here's a picture from July 1st, 2008 (when I was in Salt Lake) of Jami with her 4 children. Yes, she has 4 kids! What's most impressive about her having 4 kids is that she adopted the oldest, Braden, only 2 years ago. He was in a terrible living situation and in need of a loving, nurturing home. Jami and Kory legally adopted Braden and welcomed him into their family. This was a huge undertaking for Jami, since he was in need of so much, yet she also had a 1 year old and a 3 year old at the time. She handled it beautifully and just recently had another baby, beautiful little Megan. I'm terrible, but I still haven't posted pictures from the rest of our trip, since I took over 1000 pictures there! On our last day, Jami and I took our kids over to Natalie's house for lunch ... we sat in the backyard eating lunch, while watching all our kids play together. I also brought my niece Alyssa that day, so there were 3 moms with a total of 10 kids!!! It was crazy but tons of fun. I love Jami and Natalie and feel so lucky to have them as my friends :)