Maya tutorial - hand and eyes

I firstly messed up with the index finger because when I tried to append to poly to create the tip of the finger, it created a long spikey bit also, which was not right. 

I decided to start fresh and create the finger again, this time I understood more of what I was doing as I was more confident with the tools, so managed to make the index finger correctly. 
Next, I had to select and duplicate the index finger to create the second finger. With this I could not connect the finger vertex to the body vertexs. So I asked for help and was told that I had to firstly combine the object before connecting the vertexes.   

The second tutorial was creating the eye, I also found this really difficult but tried my best to follow the tutorial. 

I think I followed the whole tutorial correctly, as the eyes I had created looked like the tutorial's, but when I'd finished, I could not select anything but the eyes, so was not able to select the characters body for the next section.