materia and ap help please!

okay im on disc two and i have just been to mideel and found about all the huge materia so i can know do the huge materia quest and such like but i need to know how the hell do i level up my materia cause i get such lousy ap from random battles that it is gonna take me ages to level it all up, am i doing something wrong cause i reckon by the time i have leveled all my materia up my characters will be at such a high level that the rest of the game will be pretty much a diddle and i dont want that to happen. so is there some way of leveling materia up easily wihout just doing loads of random battles?
oh yeah i have just started my chocobo breeding and the amount of money needed is ridiculous and has wiped me out already and i dont have everything i need yet so am i doing something wrong and im meant to be getting loads of money from somewhere? or is this normal, cause the bloke in costa del sol wants 300000 gp for a permanent free room but that amount of money is REALLY hard to come buy if im just doing tonnes of random battles for it am i missing something?
cheers

soory, but you have to do it the way we did it, you gotta fight

You can get AP only by fighting. Go into the sleeping forest. The enemys there give you 200AP. You can level up your materia quite easyly if you have a triple growth weapon. Once you can get into the northern crater, fight magic pots and give them elixirs. And you can get a lot of money once you get the W-item materia, as you can duplicate your items.

Just don't use weapons with AP growth "None" D: evil weapons. I used the Northern Crater for AP gaining, but you're not up to that part yet.. The enemies at Mideel has a nice amount of AP, I think. Not sure though :)

The battles in Mideel forest get you between 240 and 300 AP per battle. So in triple growth slots that's between 720 and 900 AP.

The best way to raise cash is to master a lot of All materia and sell it off. You get 1,400,000 Gil for every mastered one you sell.

I suggest buying the house after breeding chocobos. It just gives you a free place to stay and there are plenty of those in the game.