Photoshop: Inverse Select, Clone Stamp & Healing Tool

I am still playing around with the picture of my friend and our kids.  I want to make it look a bit more realistic. I learned that using Inverse Select would allow me to delete the background of the image, making it (a bit) simpler for me remove all the extra little details from the photo.

In the process of trying to remove details, I removed too much of my friend's head (laugh, it's okay). I discovered, too late to just undo the mistake, that I had removed a triangular portion of her head. I used the clone stamp tool to clone a bit of her hair to replace the missing piece. Given that she did her Ph.D. research on stem cells, I have a feeling that she'll appreciate the cloning aspect of this experiment.

I have used the healing before, but it has been a while. I pulled up a photo of my friend's adorable son (one I used earlier when going through the 31 Days to a Better Photo tutorial).  This young man, my godson, is delightfully adorable.  He just happened to have a bit of...goop...on his face.

I used the healing brush to clean up the goop. I also applied "Slight Lighten" to brighten up the overall picture.

Some might say that photoshopping a baby is going too far. When you take holiday photos, for example, right after a child has had a losing battle with some blades of grass (as Ari did a few days ago), does that mean the Christmas card picture that year should just have a kid with scratches on his face?  I know that the adorable boy in the photos above doesn't always have goop on his face, so I took away the goop he happened to have at that moment.  Is that bad?