DD has 6 front teeth with 2 more now just coming in. Some of her daycare friends have 13+ teeth! She is a pretty good eater but has been slow to get there and is still not fully on adult foods. She never tolerated stage 3 baby foods because of the chunks. She would gag and vomit and we think it's that she's not ready since she doesnt have that many teeth. We recently retried stage 3 foods and she will only tolerate a little then push away. It takes her awhile to try new finger foods and often after playing with them for awhile, they wind up just thrown on the floor. She's a good eater but a lot of her foods are oatmeal, yogurt and stage 2 foods. Hoping once she gets more teeth eating won't be much of an issue. Any thoughts or anyone else with this issue?
Re: Slow eater with few teeth
Sounds like it could be more of a texture thing with your LO rather than the lack of teeth. We never actually did the Stage 3 foods and went from Stage 2 to very soft finger foods. We started with some of the melt-in-your-mouth baby foods, like the puffs, munchies, baby crackers, etc. Once he got the hang of those, we started doing soft pasta (macaroni, cut up rotini, etc.) in small enough pieces so he couldn't choke, with marinara sauce or cheese. We did lightly toasted bread with taco meat spread on top or cut up spaghetti on top, then cut the bread into small pieces so he could pick it up. His favorites have definitely been the mac and cheese (we buy Annie's whole wheat so it's a bit healthier at least) and the fish sticks (we get Wild Alaskan Polluck fish sticks from Costco in a huge bag). We also did whole wheat pancakes pretty early on - I spread Stage 2 fruit on top of them and just cut them up into bite-sized chunks for him. Scrambled eggs with shredded cheese are also pretty soft and easy to chew once babies get the hang of eating other things. Hope that gives you some ideas at least!
(Perhaps she doesn't like the Stage 3 foods? I bought some meat purees initially to try and tried a bite myself and it was TERRIBLE! I threw them all away and cooked actual ground beef and turkey instead.)
Good luck!