Need some help with some specific things in building a menu

Need some help with some specific things in building a menu

I have a mockup of a new menu I am building here. All of the css and javascript/jQuery code is on web page itself.

I just need to get two things changed and I'm done:

1)
The three middle items that have sub-menus, "services", "pricing", and "about" won't actually link to pages themselves. The CSS (I built this menu based on a web site's tutorial) is looking for the <a> tag to set the background color during a mouse-over. Since those list items don't actually link to a page, I want to remove the <a> tag from them, but keep the mouseover background coloring.

I can't figure out how to do that. I tried changing the existing CSS selectors by removing the a:hover and then adding a line in my jQuery code to add a background-color style on hover, but that only changed the <a>'s text (using parent() ) didn't work either).

How can I remove those three <a> tags but keep the mouseover background styling effect?

2)
You'll notice I'm using fadeIn() for the mouseover event. I would like to use fadeOut() as well, but adding that to my existing mouseout line does nothing. How can I use fadeOut() with what I have?

Thanks for anyone's help!