Non American strtotime

Is there a way I can force PHP's time functions not to read date strings in the American MM-DD-YYYY format? I am using strtotime and strftime and date at various points (mainlty to avoid some niggly 0/NULL problems between PHP and mySQL and datefields). My date calculations (which are done in mySQL) are coming out with screwy results: adding 6 months the 3rd July becomes 7th September. ("03/07/2004" reads as 7th March, add six months for 7th September which is then displayed as "07/09/2003"). Is there a way I can have strtotime read "10-01-2004" (and all other such date connotations) as the 10th Jan and not 1st Oct? Thanks.