A new class parent has been blogging about her experiences. This is her latest report.

By 10:45 a.m. Sunday, when 15 minutes had passed since the scheduled start time with nary a guest in sight, I began to regret having invited all the parents in my twins' prekindergarten class over to our building's roof deck for bagels.

Gary Rudoren for SchoolBook

By 10:55, long after the burbling of the percolating coffee in the 28-cup urn I had borrowed from a neighborhood went silent, I was regretting having signed up to be co-class parent and reconsidering our decision to send the children to Public School 11 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

And when 11 a.m. came and went, I was wondering whether it had been a mistake to have children in the first place.

My husband, helpfully, inquired as to whether I had sent out a follow-up e-mail. No. But I had slipped reminders into everybody's classroom mailbox. (Yes, the one that my co-class parent said nobody looks in!)

You know that feeling when you finish setting up for a party, and you're waiting for what seems like forever for your fashionably late friends, and you convince yourself that they have all conspired against you not to show up?

It's worse when you don't even know the people — why would people who don't even know you conspire?

It's even worse when your 4-year-old daughter keeps asking, "Where are all the guests?"

Where, indeed. Finally, around 11:05, a boy in the class showed up, with big sister, mom and homemade banana bread.

And then another boy, with brother, mom and a very cool grandma from Vermont, who before party's end would show me a terrific flip maneuver to hoist a heavy child onto one's back.

Then the impossibly hip guy who skateboards to school while pushing his 18-month-old in a stroller, prekindergartner scooting alongside. It turns out he is a chef at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan, trained with Tom Colicchio. My brain immediately began churning: What kind of cooking demos could he do for the prekindergartners? What kind of parental demos might he donate to the class-parent-basket fund-raiser I had just agreed to head up?

And, later, when talk somehow turned to my impulse Internet purchase of a dehydrator and subsequent failed efforts at making beet chips that crunch, would he perhaps like to have my dehydrator? (Upon visual inspection, no; he did not like the design. Which made me think the lack of crunch was not entirely my fault.)

Eventually six families showed up — or, including our matched set, eight of the 18 children in the class. Though my daughter continued to ask, "When are the other guests coming?" those children who made it greeted each other with humongous hugs and then proceeded to torment each other on the playground, prompting several bilateral family summits in which apologies were procured from both sides and hugs or high fives exchanged.

People seemed to genuinely enjoy my pumpkin chocolate-chip bread. (I admit to being a tiny bit stung when the chef, apparently unimpressed by my purposely low-key spread of bagels, fruit and goldfish crackers, told his son it was time to go to lunch.) The coffee was a bit muddy, but at least it was hot. My husband got a lot of points for thinking we should have name tags, and for his clever signs posted throughout the building to guide people to the deck.

We parents exchanged the usual biographical tidbits — where from, where live, what do — and found some new connections (something to do with the drummer from Fugazi, some confusion over how to pronounce his name).

There was some shared frustration over the fact that parent-teacher conferences were scheduled for Tuesday and our teacher had not yet put out a sign-up sheet. There was the inevitable talk of What We Were Planning to Do for Kindergarten. There were promises of play dates, now that we realized how close several of us lived to one another. (We can see two classmates' apartments from the roof deck!)

Monday morning at drop-off, as we crowded around the newly posted sign-up sheet for parent-teacher conferences, we brunch-goers greeted each other like old friends. We'll do it again in the spring, I promised. Only next time maybe I'll call it for half an hour earlier than I really want people to show up.