I received a phone call one morning. It sounded like a stranger, but as he continued to talk, I realized it was a good friend wondering where I had been. He thought maybe I had skipped the country – I assured him my head had been buried in graduation open house preparations, and I would come up for air when it was all over.

June 3 came and went, my second child is graduated and will head off to college, while I take a year off from planning, panicking, sorting pictures, refinishing floors, landscaping corners of the farm no one ever sees and basically making my family miserable for a solid month – also known as preparing for a graduation open house.

While trying to figure out what I would feed people, I could have gone on open house planning websites and looked for a really cool, original theme, trying to make my kid’s open house the envy of the other 35 graduating seniors’ families, but instead, I decided to go a much simpler route: Milk promotion.

Although product promotion is not the norm when it comes to graduation open houses, I decided if we were going to have a crowd of folks on the farm, why not kill two birds with one stone and combine a graduation celebration and June Dairy Month promotion?

Because my family is passionate about ice cream, I decided we would forgo the pulled pork and potato salad and just have a full buffet of ice cream. But the dairy promotion didn’t stop there.

The week before, as I was cleaning a closet (because that’s what you do when you have an open house, you clean every part of your house even though people will never see it), I found a roll of milk mustache stickers left over from a milk promotion event … and then the wheels began to turn.

I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have everyone stand in front of a got milk? banner and get their picture taken with the graduate? I pulled out the banner, had Luke mount it on the back of the garage and I had an instant photo booth.

When I told my family of my idea, they were all a little skeptical, especially Luke. His face was less than enthusiastic when I said he was going to get his picture taken with everyone who came to the open house – with a milk mustache. When my family support dwindled, I began to doubt my idea, until the first couple of teenagers eagerly donned their mustaches and posed for the camera.

Before long I had no resistance to the idea. Luke willingly put a new mustache on with each picture while his girlfriend stood beside me and coached everyone on how to put it on without it coming off.

Classmates, neighbors, senior citizens, young married couples, little children – everyone – was willing to get in on the act as they pressed on their white mustache and grinned for the graduate. As the open house wound down, we had successfully served everyone a dairy product, touted the benefits of dairy in their diet and honored a dairy farmer’s kid on his graduation day.

Thank you, America’s dairy farmers, for providing the goods for this graduation celebration!

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Melissa Hart may write to her in care of this publication.