Welcome.. give it time and you'll do better - again, you might just want to be sure you take multiple photos of the same scene too... if you camera allows it, set it up for bracketing and set it to +/- 0.7 EV. Then, you will get 3 photos... 1 might be underexposed.. 1 might be overexposed and 1 might be ok.. you can then either use the best one and work on it from there or use software (or photoshop) to merge them together taking the best areas of each photo and masking out the bad areas to get one perfect image...

if no bracketing (because it is a P&S), just set the camera to manual and do the exposure settings yourself... easy and the best way to learn and understand how to get the results you'd like.. Good Luck!