mmm. that's not how i'm reading the doc: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/ref/models/querysets/#get-or-create
`Any keyword arguments passed to get_or_create() — except an optional one called defaults — will be used in a get() call.`

It seems like they have an explicit `defaults` kwarg for handling defaults during creation.  Could you switch to that syntax, instead?