Pinwheel Baby Blanket start

Found out exciting news Saturday.  Yay, there's going to be a baby to spoil and practice on before I have one of my own!  This completely upsets the to do list for knitting and crocheting.  I now have baby blankets and booties and sweater and other fun stuff to get done by May.

First up, Pinwheel Blanket from Ravelry.  I'm still looking for booties etc, but for the first blanket, it's going to be round and stripy and very colorful.  I'm looking at a final diameter of about 38 inches (seems big enough I think).

This should be easy right?  Knit in the round with the occasional yarn-over until big enough.  And now that I'm something like 12 rows in, it is!  The first 5 rounds however, are *very* fiddly.  Expanding 5 stitches out to 20 over the course of 3 rows is kinda difficult.  Specifically, knitting 5 stitches in the round is almost impossible.  It took me about 3 hours to cast this thing on and to get more than 3 rows in.  There are a number of different methods detailed around on the web about how to get this thing cast on, among them to do a crochet cast on, magic loop, etc.  I tried everything I could find after the first 2 attempts of knitting in the round over 3 dpns failed.  In the end, several hours later, I ended up going back to knitting in the round and just cursing a fair bit. 

The main issue seems to be that there's nothing to stablize the stitches except carefully knitting and patience.

My pattern mods (so far)
Knit cast on 5 stitches.
Join into loop.
1: K1, Make 1 (yarn over method)= 10 stitches.  Mark beginning of round.
2: Knit row
3: K1, yarn over= 20 stitches
4: knit row
5: K2, yo; repeat around.  Place marker before each yo, slide them as you come to them.
6: knit row
7: K3, yo; repeat around
8: knit row
odd rows: K(x), yo; repeat around
even rows: knit row

So far, 12 rows in, it looks like this:

This is before I added the markers so I don't have to think about where the yarn overs go anymore, but it's a good start.