Your sock looks great! I like the contrast toe and heel

My mom is asking good questions, but I’m really struggling to explain how everything interacts in a way that makes sense to her

You’re welcome! Feel free to ask me if you need more help!

The tension won’t be perfect, but it will even it out when you block. Take your time. Key things are to make sure the loops you pick up are in the right direction, and to make sure you use the rows of yarn in the right order

That can be a good way to do that for a single stitch, but what I’d do for this is drop the entire section, unravel it back to the point where it’s correct, and then reknit each row until you’re back to the row you’re on

If you missed an increase on a very early round, it might not be worth dropping stitches down, because you’ll have extra stitches on every row, and that means you’ll be short some yarn on every row. You can fudge it, but it might be more trouble than it’s worth

Assuming the metal marker is supposed to be the centre of the increase, it looks like the stitch circled in black is the first increase in the wrong spot. But double check the spot in blue, because it looks to me like there’s an increase missing there.

It looks like for the increases on the right side of the photo, sometimes you might have been using the metal marker as the centre of the raglan increase, and sometimes the blue marker.

It’s possible to fix if you’re willing to try dropping the stitches back down and trying to reknit the section

My small town does have a store, so I’ll definitely check it out! Thanks!

I haven’t been in an M&M store in probably 20 years, and have ignored them as an adult because I’m mostly-vegetarian and I assumed it was all meat.

Now I’m going to have to go look at what they have