Shoot and edit part 2

Okay here was my original photo, SOOC...

Here's what I did to it.  I tried to follow Ashley's steps, but obviously our images were very different, so I adjusted accordingly.  It went something like this:

I did the following in Lightroom3:
-created custom white balance by selecting the white of her pacifier
-decreased the exposure a bit
-upped the blacks a bit
-increased brightness by juuuust a little
-increased contrast slightly
-increased saturation a tad

Then I opened the image in Photoshop CS... yeah, that's right, the original CS... I'm pretty sure I got it free somehow, and I'm too poor to afford an upgrade.  Anyway, I then...
-applied high pass filter and applied soft light blending mode, as per Ashley's suggestion
-created new adjustment layer: levels and adjusted the middle bar just slightly to 1.2
-used the healing brush and clone stamp to remove all distracting background, which took me forever because I'm not very good at it.

I then applied two actions:
(1) coffee shop little perk at 22 % and
(2) Pioneer woman's "lovely and ethereal" at 50%
then I sharpened her eyes slightly, just because.

Finally, I was annoyed at how blue the whites of her eyes were, so I'm not sure how you are "supposed" to fix that, but I just used a white paint brush at a very low opacity and voila. 

And side-by-side.

Now be honest, what do you think?  Don't say you like it just to humor me. :)