Virtual Hosts not working right

i’ve tried everything i can think of but for whatever reason, when trying to use virtual host on my Mac (10.9 Mavericks), i can successfully run 2 virtual hosts, but if i attempt to add more, they just do not work. Obviously vhosts is turned on and working for 2 sites, but why on Earth can’t i add more? Shouldn’t it just work, or not work?

i’m currently using MAMP, although in frustration i went so far as to attempt to just ditch MAMP and ‘go native’, installing PHP, MySQL and using OSX built in apache… oddly enough – same thing. 2 virtual hosts work. Arrrggg.

for reference i have :
added the domains to the hosts file (as example)
127.0.0.1  site1.dev
127.0.0.1  site2.dev, etc.
uncommented ‘Include…httpd-vhosts.conf’ in httpd.conf, and
added the domains to the httpd-vhosts.conf file (as example):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/jamiejones/Sites/site1”
    ServerName site1.dev
</VirtualHost>

i’ve also tried adding various directory settings as in the following example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/jamiejones/Sites/sheilahixson”
    ServerName sheilahixson.dev
    ServerAlias www.sheilahixson.dev
<Directory "/Users/jamiejones/Sites/sheilahixson">
	DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
        AllowOverride all
        Options -MultiViews
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Any help would be most appreciated. I have to start a new wordpress site next week, and i’d love to be able to develop it locally with vhosts enabled. Help!