Looking for some PowerPoint help (Custom Animations)

Hello all.

I'm creating a single-slide presentation on PowerPoint:Mac 2011.

I have everything already laid out, and am now trying to have it appear on the slide in a particular order. This is easy to do when its a single text box and you can CMD+click multiple text boxes to have them appear at the same time.

However, three of the groups of text are part of a SmartArt Process (think flowchart/timeline). Whenever I do custom animations on these groups, I can't combine the groups together. The closest I've gotten is to reorder them.

(For a visual, in the custom animations pane, numbered boxes are listed as "5, 6, 7" instead of "5, 5, 5")

Any help is appreciated. TIA.