Calendar and Conditional Formatting

Good morning. I have been trying to create a PTO calendar to keep track of my vacation hours I use at work. I have it set up how I want except I cannot get the conditional formatting to work how I want. My goal is to have it where in column "AC" I will type in a date like 3/7/2014 and it will highlight in the calendar cells A6:W40. I can make that work if I was doing just 1 day but I have a list of days and I didnt want to have to create a new rule for each cell to do an Specific Text. Can I use the Specific Text or something like it so it will search all of them? Attached is the calendar I am working on.

Thank you very much!