Last Friday (Aug. 12), Ethan Moore, 1 ½, was playing with bubbles in the backyard of his home with his mother Brittany Moore. As the toddler playfully chased the bubbles, he abruptly stopped when he got to the fence. His mother was shocked when she discovered what it was that distracted him.

“I went over there and was like, ‘What do you see buddy?'” Brittany said to local Atlanta news station CBS 46. Ethan replied, “Feet.” Wanting to be certain that she heard her son correctly, she said, “Okay, buddy can you say that again? What did you say?” Again, the toddler responded, “Feet.” At first glance, she didn’t see anything in the wooded area behind their home, but then crouched down to get a better look at her son’s eye level. Just as Ethan had said, Brittany saw a pair of feet.

“If you get on his level and look through, you can see some of the broken sticks and that’s where she was laying,” she shared. “I didn’t know if I needed to go into fight or flight because I had my little boy out here and the other inside,” the mother recalled. After initially panicking, Brittney quickly contacted authorities. Once on the scene, officials discovered the feet belonged to 82-year-old Nina Lipscomb. She was alive but disoriented.

The elderly woman suffers from early-stage Alzheimer’s and had been missing since Monday night (Aug. 8). Officials added they’d done all they could to locate Lipscomb — even used thermal technology to find her — with no luck. Ethan discovered Lipscomb less than a quarter of a mile from where she originally went missing. Her daughter Karen said the elderly woman had gone wandering in search of her sister, who recently passed away. “Her sister lived here in this house, but she passed away in March but growing up they lived on Glacier Road which is just around the corner,” Karen said.

Once Lipscomb was examined at a hospital and released to the care of her family, she and Ethan finally met. ​​“We pulled out every resource we thought we needed but it was a little boy and she’s very fond of children,” Lipscomb’s daughter said. Nina turns 83 tomorrow (Aug. 19).