Hi Raina,
Glad to hear that things are starting to work out. So that you are aware of the full range of video tutorial resources, you can find all of my tutorial series here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6HWbF4UtdKdjbZ2tvwiCQ/playlists
And Mostapha made a tutorial series on daylight from his workshop at Penn that you can find on this page:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MostaphaSad/playlists
If the child and parent component does not work, it should give you an error about what is going wrong. If not, make sure that the inputs are not in separate data trees branches (flatten the inputs). List alignment, list management, and data tree structures are really important for anything in Grasshopper and it might be a good idea to see if you can find some videos explaining these concepts.
You can account for shades in your EnergyPlus runs by using the “Window Shade Generator” component. You will have to create your own CSV schedules showing when the blinds are pulled that is aligned with the conceptual shading schedule (see videos 20 and 21 on the HB Energy Modeling playlist).
-Chris