Pull list of recent posts from blog to website homepage

Hi there,

I have a site that I am making for my mom, and I just set her up with one of your awesome blogs. Took me a while to get it formatted nicely, but here it finally is: http://tahoeweddingsagogo.com/blog/ (still has some work to be done)

I would like to pull the 5 most recent posts with title and maybe the first 10 words of the actual post, and put them into a list on the main page of her site. Currently the page is index.html, and I have read that it will need to be index.php, which is fine.

Here is my problem: I have read and read, and I can not figure out if I need to replace the entire header with a php call to pull the header.php file in order to get the php rolling, or if I can have the header be HTML and just put “the loop” in somewhere. Also, I have no idea how to code the actual php pull of the info I described above (title and first part of body of 5 most recent posts”

Thank you