Marcia Cross: 'I Feel So Lucky' | Marcia Cross
I'll tell you my routine – it's really exciting," says Marcia Cross with a laugh. Curled up in a chair in her Santa Monica, Calif., home, she cheerily ticks off the daily new-mom schedule she has adhered to since Feb. 20 – the day she and husband Tom Mahoney welcomed their fraternal twin daughters Eden and Savannah. "I feed, I burp, I change diapers, I pump. And then I have a tiny window of time to myself," says the actress – whose makeup-free face, loose red hair and comfy cargo pants make her look like the easygoing, serene sister of her Desperate Housewives character, the immaculately polished Bree Hodge. Earlier in the day, "Tom was dancing with Eden," says Cross, sipping a mug of herbal tea for lactating mothers while the twins snooze upstairs. "We put on some Tchaikovsky and they were dancing to Swan Lake. That was just – " she lets out a deep sigh – "so beautiful."

It's the kind of blissful family moment Cross, who turned 45 shortly after the twins' birth, has been craving for more than a decade – or, as she jokingly puts it, "the longest wait in history." In the past 10 months, the woman who 2 ½ years ago told Oprah Winfrey she was "desperate to be a housewife" became both a newlywed and a member of Club Mom twice over. "I wanted to be a member of that club so badly, and now I'm in and it's so much better than I even imagined," she says. "Even before I was 30 I started thinking about [motherhood]," says Cross, who grew up as the middle of three daughters of Mark, a retired personnel manager, and Janet, a retired teacher, in Marlborough, Mass. "The years started going by and I was anxious about the clock ticking. Now it seems like it was all meant to be."

Her ginger-haired babies "are absolutely breathtaking," says Cross's Housewives costar Eva Longoria, who visited when the twins were just a couple of weeks old. "It's a surreal feeling, because our lives are so different from when we started the show." Adds the show's creator Marc Cherry: "Three years ago Marcia got this job and was a little, 'What do I know about being a housewife?' Now she's got it all."