First real photo shoot, a comedy of errors

I'm hoping this is just one of those things that every amateur photographer has to go through when they're getting started. It was tough. 4 kids, ages 4-7. Two of them the Mom's, two of them the Dad's, and they're getting married soon. The kids weren't bad, but the parents were no help, yelling at them to turn around when I was trying to get some unposed, candid shots, yelling at them to look at me during the posed shots, which just made the kids look at their parents. And the kids were more interested in playing with the sand than having their picture taken. And I know better now than to try beach pictures with the sun that high in the sky. The lighting was too harsh and the kids squinted a lot. Then I just made some dumb mistakes; I accidently set my exposure levels too high and forgot to make sure my settings were where I wanted them to be before starting. Because of that my exposures ended up too slow and there were a lot of blurry shots. And there were some other problems that I'm not even sure how they happened! My f-stop flucuated wildly 4 on some, 22 on others and I don't know why, I was shooting on aperature priority. At least I thought I was! More blur issues on the F22 settings. And I shot on RAW and didn't mean to. *siiiiiiiiiiiiigh* At least these people weren't paying anything, they responded to an ad I put on freecycle to build up my portfolio, but I doubt I'm getting any referrals out of this. I'm better than this, I know that! Well, it was a learning experience.