Hi joyfulcode,
To do an offset I think you could just add "start=n" right after you've got "sort=date" where n is the number of items to offset (though this attribute is a bit hard to find; even using the cheatsheet search). Using the example from the docs:
<ul><?php
$moreitems = $page->children("sort=date, start=3");
foreach ($moreitems as $item)
echo "<li><a href='{$item->url}'>{$item->title}</a></li>";
?>
</ul>