Cooking for a month?!

My friend Amanda and I have been doing once a month cooking for a couple of months now. For the past two months we have picked out around 7-10 meals and took one day to cook them. This brilliant idea came from a book she had. So this month we decided to go with this authors plan. Basically we ended up with 35+ meals. Oh - My - Gosh - was it a mess. I'm not joking when I say I think we dirtied every dish in her kitchen. This was last friday. I had to get up at 5:00 that morning because I didn't do all my "prep" work the night before because John McCain's speech was on at the RNC and I couldn't miss that. So at 5:15 I'm headed to good ol' Walmart. (Thank goodness they are open 24hrs a day.) Got home and started cooking just a little after 5:30. About 10am we took our kids to Mom's Day Out and I moved all my stuff over to Amanda's house. I felt like we were moving along pretty good - but then we had to pick up the kids. This is whats wrong with our plan. We don't want to pay for daycare (okay we're cheap - why do you think we are doing this to begin with) so we are trying to deal with kids, who we thought would take really long naps since they played so hard at Mom's Day Out. Yeah right. Adam never took a nap but he still did pretty good since he just likes to watch movies. So about 5:30 I am trying to get ahold of Scott to come get the kids. He makes it over and I send some food and the kids home with him. All the while we are still cooking. Amanda finds out her husband isn't going to be home till late so she takes her son over to my house for Scott to watch. Eventuall we break out the wine - it has been a really long day. So once we get done cleaning up her kitchen she helps me get all my food and supplies to my house and clean and put everything away. I finally set down at 11:30 PM! What this author says should take 6 hrs took me 18 1/2 hours..... I know I'm sounding like I'm complaining but I'm really not. I haven't had to cook yet and the meals have been pretty good. Once we get the hang of this I know we'll go faster. I'm sure it would go faster if we each cooked in our own kitchen but whats the fun of that?