Practicing the fundamentals is way more important and I can see that you definitely have some skills! 
@kirsten-mcg Sorry, bit late to the party but better late then never I guess. I really love how this turned out! It looks really nice, great job! 
But since you had a hard time with finding the right color I want to give you some feedback. First of all great job on finding a good color scheme with the complementary colors with the orange and blues! But I do feel its a bit lost in the final image. To just push this a bit more I would set a layer in photoshop to overlay and paint over the whole background with a desaturated blue tone, and really make the bird pop out. And this also creates a nice atmospheric effect like it would be a scene at night.
I feel the vocal points should be the bird and also the kids, so everything in the background should stay in the blue color family as much as possible. Right now for instance, the wood of the stairs in the background is in the red family and the stairs is in the blue, this creates color contrast (aka complementary colors) and this really attracts the eye. If you put a blue overlay on it, the reds are pulled more towards the blues. I also would add a layer in linear dodge mode with a dark red just on the kids faces to pull those more to the red family. To show all this I feel like a picture speaks more than words, so I created a paint over for you.
Hope this helps! 
