Big Pics in Homepage JQuery Slideshow Causing Forever For Page To Load ... Any Ideas on How To Fix?

I have a custom Wordpress site that I designed using jquery cycle plugin to manage a homepage slideshow, as well as multiple other slideshows throughout the site.

You can see the site here Fitness by the Sea | Just another WordPress site (hope it's cool to post that url)

My client wants to have 36 images on the homepage slider with transparency around each image. These massive .png's cause the page to load really slow because the jquery cycle plugin has to download all of the images on the initial page load. We're talking about 15mb of data that has to be downloaded before the page loads ... it's insane. I've optimized the .png's with fireworks to reduce the size, but they look grainy and it's still about 7mb to download.

I need to come up with a way to keep those big beautiful images with transparency on the homepage, but cut the load time way down.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I was thinking that maybe Flash or an AJAX solution might work. But I don't work with either of these two ... so I'm looking to an expert for a solution.

Please help!!!

I need a solution fast because this client need the site speed optimized in less than two weeks ... preferably one week.