I'd really like to add category menus like thehappyhousewife.com has on the bottom half of her page, (the boxes with recent posts and cute headers) with a slider above.

She is using a customized Genesis child theme, but I'm trying to figure out if I can do something similar with Atahualpa. I know how to add a slider, but I'm stumped with the category sections.

Any idea how I can do this?

Widgets in sidebars on a static page? If so, how do I hide the center column and can I put the slider in a widget? Add in widget areas into the center column? Or is this going to be way too big of a PITA to do?

My site is thebizymommy.com if you'd like to get a look at what I'm working with. I'd like to keep my two right sidebars on the home page if at all possible.

Thanks for your help!

BTW, I did poke around with juggledad's multi column/custom query page template, but couldn't get that to work either. But I am not really familiar with custom queries, so it could just be that I'm going about it all wrong.