Why can he eat crackers but not stage 3 jars?

It is the texture. It is thick with little lumps in it. You can try mixing just a bit of Stage 3 with Stage 2 and increase it slowly to help him adjust. You may just have to give him 3 jars of S2 for a while. Also what are you giving him in those S3's? Some of the stuff is downright nasty. There is a great book called "Feed Me I'm Yours" Great baby and toddler recipes! Also you can look up making homemade babyfood. heck don't look it up just start mashing things up - like cooked veggies and pasta and stuff. He's gonna eat it soon enough. Why keep spending money on store bought baby food?

The chunks in something he expects to be mushy might be throwing him off. Have you tried just going to table food? Most of the foods we eat can be altered to be safe enough for baby. Make sure fruit and veggies are soft enough to be gummed, and won't bite off in hard chunks. Meats should be in bits-shredded or ground is easiest.

My son never really ate much of the stage 3 stuff. By the time we went to it, he was pretty much hating baby food in general. We had him eating just about anything we had, by the time he was 9 months old. We just cut it up if it needed it, and gave him his own plate. He was even eating kids meals from restaurants. He was a big eater, too when he was that age, though! He would eat 10-12 jars of food a day before we switched him over! And then once we started table food, he wouldn't eat baby food, so we still have probably 6 dozen or more jars that I need to get rid of.

This is kind of funny because I had the same problem (well similar anyway) with mine at dinner last night! What my mom said about it didn't relate with babies but it still made sense. She works in a personal care home with elderly patients. She said that a lot of them have trouble with pudding (similar texture to stage 3) because it's too thick to just "slide" down but too thin to trigger the type of swallowing that's required. I haven't done much jarred baby food with this one or my 2 year old when he was little so it's been awhile but I think my 4 year old pretty much skipped from stage 2 to mashed/cut up table foods. Actually the only jarred foods I've used with this one were a few stage 2's that hadn't expired yet from what we bought for the 2 year old back when he was on baby food. He wasn't impressed with any of it past stage 1 and he never seemed to get full unless he ate mashed "real food" so we switched him pretty early.

My son is going to be 16 months old and he NEVER liked the stage 3 baby foods. He would also choke and gag and sometimes he would seal his mouth shut. I think it's the consistancy or just the flavor that he didn't like. He still eats the occasional jar of baby food for a snack but it's always stage 2. I never understood why he didn't like stage 3 but when he was "ready" for more food I just put him on table foods.