Building a custom triple loop

Hi,
I have a problem within my loops, and hope someone will light up my path here.

I’m trying to get 3 different loops to work in my homepage. (Actually, I’m not sure that three completely different loops is what I need, so any suggestion is welcome too!)

My site has just two categories. I want to display the most recent post from each category on the homepage, and then just display a list of the next 6 posts excerpts. I can control what happens inside the loop (the_content, title, excerpt, etc etc), but can’t get my whole setup to work.

Should I have a first loop, with if/else statement for the first part and a second loop to display the headlines only? How do I tell the second loop NOT to display the two “featured” posts?

Any ideas extremely welcome!